I feel like a bad Emacs user because, while I've been using it for a long time, it's only been in the past few months that I have embraced Orgmode as my task manager. Sometime I will probably write about my journey to this point, but for now I want …
It's been a while since I wrote for the Emacs Blog Carnival but I have missed it. I decided to dip my toes back in when I saw July 2026's theme - Programming. I started thinking about how my Emacs configuration for development isn't that special and then I realized that …
I've always been a bit picky about fonts in books, the web, programming, etc. I want something that is easy to read and tell characters apart. While some developers choose fonts that are very light so they can get more characters in a line or screen, I go with readability …
A few weeks back I wrote about Maps and how MapUtils.isEmpty from Apache Commons Collections made the null-checks go away with isEmpty . Since then, I've been poking around the rest of MapUtils and it turns out the isEmpty method is not the only goodie hidden in there. MapUtils also …
I'm back doing Java stuff for a while, and a lot of our codebase uses Maps a lot. Though it's a new project, the codebase leans heavily on the style of Java 7/8 and not with the new patterns that came with Java 9 and above. Here are some …
This is my Emacs Carnival post this month on Mistakes and Misconceptions. Just in the past year, I realized something surprising: I no longer have vi muscle memory. I was a dedicated vi user for fifteen years before I switched to Emacs, and at some point it just… left. I …
In my last post I mentioned I switched to Readeck as my read-it-later app. It's starting to become essential to my workflow. The first thing that struck me was how fast it feels. My old Wallabag instance was sluggish when saving an article. Readeck saves asynchronously: you tell it to …
I realized that my article from last fall on self-hosting on the NAS is now outdated. Not only am I not hosting apps on my NAS anymore, but I'm not even using those apps anymore. I started using Pikapod to host my RSS and read-it-later apps. Pikapod hosts a lot …
This is part of the February 2026 Emacs Blog Carnival on Completion For me, completion is a odd thing to have as a carnival theme mostly because I just "do completion" and don't think about it. I really had to do a lot of thinking just to figure out what …
I like Git a lot and I know how to use it fairly well.. I wouldn't consider myself an ultimate expert – more like an intermediate user that has found themselves in weird situations with Git and, most of the time, figuring out how to get out of them My main …
This is to join in on October 2025's Emacs Blog Carnval: Maintenance This is an ironic subject for me, because my Emacs config is full of stuff – and some of it I use. I do a lot of experimentation and trying out new packages. Some of them are "oh this …
This is my entry to the Emacs Carnvial - Obscure Packages. It's funny to say that Transient is an obscure package not just because it's now bundled in Emacs , but also because one of the killer apps in Emacs – Magit – uses it. But how many people make their own Transient menus …
This article from Glyph talks about not using the __init__ dunder function to initialize a class and instead use the dataclass in the standard library. I read his post and experimented with this new way to make a constructor and decided that I totally agreed – this was a much cleaner …
A couple of weeks ago I read a long article about Lotus Agenda. I had heard of Agenda before – I had read man times that it was a much beloved niche product that was way ahead of it's time. You can read this particular article yourself – I'm not going to …
This is my submission for the August Emacs Carnival – the Emacs Elevator Pitch. My pitch is simple, but then it takes a little while to explain: Emacs works for you, you won't work for Emacs. Overall I think the heart of my pitch reflects on my own personal belief about …
The shutdown of Pocket (that I didn't hadn't used in a long while) got me into self-hosting my RSS Reader and my Read-It Later systems. When I bought my Synology NAS a few years ago, I unknowingly bought a model that has an ARM processor, which does not support Docker …
This is to join in on this month's Emacs Blog Carnival: The Writing Experience. The "Writing Experience" is a timely theme because I recently changed from using Obsidian for my note habit to Emacs. I'm not going into a long list of reasons why but it all comes down to …
This is part of the Emacs: Carnival: Take Two challenge. This may be hard to believe, but when I first exposed to Emacs, I dismissed it almost immediately. I was taking a Unix class while at in the university and the horrible professor was an Emacs fan. He tried to …
Some Emacs tweaks that have made a big difference in my workflow
Setting up a complicated query to be a SQLAlchemy object
How I use git-worktrees
How I discovered Hyperbole and what it is to me
How I setup projects now, using CookieCutter
Talk about how I integrate Linking Your Thinking into my knowledge base/solution log
This is how I use Nix for my day to day work
This is what I do to review last week and to prep for the next
Apps that I use and why, 2021 edition
A little while ago I ran into someone and we ended up chatting about this blog. He asked an interesting question – "Why do you write the blog?". I didn't have an answer then and I'm not sure that I have one now, but I'm writing about it anyway. A day …
A few weeks ago, I was surprised when I was asked to demo a webservice that I wrote. Since I didn't prep a Postman config for it (because I don't use Postman unless I have to, like during demos ) I got out Emacs and opened the orgfile that I had …
My previous post about my bullet journal got me thinking of rapid logging, and got me thinking about how projects in Todoist aren't just working for me – and suddenly I found myself in another Todo App Crisis. I have a friend that that shares the productivity bug with me and …
1 If 2020 was the Year of Taking Notes , then 2021 is turning into the year of handwriting notes. And if you know me this is quite a change – I have been proudly typing things out for years, leaving writing things by hand proudly behind. A big part of it …
The idea of the new house started when we moved into the old one. It was a concept, an idea that we joked about. "Well in our next house we want… "" and then we would chuckle. I mean there were things that we didn’t like and so we changed …
It was a long time ago when I first discovered Sudoku. I do remember it well… I had a long flight ahead of me and this was before I had a smart phone..I had some books (like printed) but wanted something else in case the books made me lose …
TL;DR – rclone truly is the Swiss Army knife of cloud storage and you should look into it if you have to deal with that world at all (S3, DropBox, OneDrive, etc). In the past I really had an addiction to Humble Bundle , where I bought a lot of cheap …
Been thinking a lot lately of the current state of video games.. I'm not sure why. Technically, we own an XBox One but my son plays on it mostly (or, er, most of the time) and I've dabbled a bit in other games, specifically Minecraft and Stardew Valley , which in …
As this crazy year closes, my wife and I were chuckling about how many TV Series we binged while in isolation. We started more than we finished – if one us is isn't totally into it, we have no problems in stopping. These are the ones we liked the best. This …
It was funny – the day after I finally put up a blog post I got an email from Webfaction that my account was closed. That was funny. I mean I knew they were migrating sites and I had a couple of old Django playgrounds on there, plus my person blog …
Hey it's December and it's my second blog of 2020. Almost a year since my last update. Let's not talk about the strange year of 2020… sometimes I do an unintentional Big Thing(tm) for me, learning-wise or tech-wise of the year. A few weeks ago I figured out what …
This year I've discovered the blog Uses This and I'm fascinated by it. Since I will never be on there, I decided to roll my own. As I started thinking about it, I realized that I kinda have something like it , at least describing my current development environment so maybe …
Kasim Tuman recently wrote that Emacs is like a workbench. It evolves as you get better with your work – or changes as your works changes. I think that is a great metaphor of not just Emacs, but software development tools in general. So this post is about my evolving workbench …
For several months, I've been converting a few of my dotfiles into OrgMode files and using tangling to generate the config file and the same file generates HTML documentation. The point was to always publish them – and I finally have. See the HTML version or the github project . Note that …
It's funny as I have hit solidly middle age, when you figure things about yourself that have always been there – but you have just noted it. I can list quite a few things – both positive and negative. But what the one I have just simply noticed is music. This should …
I'm not sure how many other people remember Nextel but I do, maybe because my first job out of college used them a lot. They had one really cool feature on their phones – a walkit-talkie like functionality. You could hold a button and talk, and people on your list of …
I've gotten back to blogs again. And that meant I needed an RSS Reader. The qualifications: web-based but have an Android app interface gets out of my way to read an article favorite support syncs often still under active development ability to pay a reasonable price for the service (because …
In an odd series of events, we played our Wii again for the first time in years. We had a lot of fun bowling and my son discovered how hard Wii golf can really be, but then he cleaned us up on the tennis court. He was a baby in …
Somehow, by accident, 2018 has become the year of Emacs. I did write about some Emacs improvements I was doing, but it seems to be something I have come back to time after time. My latest work project is a large, mostly-standard Java app with some Spring sprinkled in here …
Lots of little ideas in my head that don't seem to make up a good post for each one, so I'm putting them into on. Be prepared for utter chaos . I read about a compact microtool on the Cool Tools blog and I had misplaced my (larger) Leatherman I carried …
Some things on editing I found this weekend: EDITOR vs VISUAL . I didn't know there was a difference between the environment variables EDITOR and VISUAL and I always set the former. But I was way wrong. There seems little point in setting EDITOR unless you still work inside serial connections …
https://i.imgur.com/Sh7r8I4.jpg I started brewing beer over a year ago and, for some reason, I haven't blogged about it. Which is funny, since beer and homebrewing have become popular keywords for my web searches over the past year. And, yes, that pic above is one of …
I've failed to blog about one of my more geeky things I've done in the past year – setup a RetroPie . Note that it's not Retro/Pi/ because you can install it on more things than a RasberryPi… though that is exactly what I did. For the 2016-17 school year, my …