Recent content on Martin's Blog
to only add items to your init files you understand and document them? This may be evident for you but took me a long time to realize and follow. This post for Emacs Carnival May 2026 describes my workflow for changing my init files.
I wrote about it a while back but meanwhile some tools no longer exist and I stopped using some others. This post describes my current setup as well as my plans for the next evolution. The intention and generic workflow remains unchanged but some tools have changed
This post is in response to Ellane’s invitation to answer eight questions about using plain text files.
A few years ago I came across the Johnny.Decimal system to organise your life and I find it really useful to organise stuff at work. An important part of the concept is the index or JDex . Johnny recommends storing it in a notes app and has examples for Bear and Obsidian. I prefer Emacs and Orgmode. Of course Emacs makes it easy to streamline the workflow. This post describes my configuration and…
Most people interested in security will have heard about the threat quantum computers pose to currently used encryption. Consequently, post-quantum cryptography is an active field of research which finally led to standardisation of some post quantum cryptography algorithms. Different software and services have started to support these algorithms out of the box one of them being OpenSSH . It not…
Nicolas P. Rougier has created numerous packages that give Emacs a nice clean appearance. After using his theme and some other parts of it for a while I decided to go back to the modus theme but still wanted to keep using the nano-modeline . He has shared on Reddit a while back that he performed a rewrite of it so that’s what I wanted to use. I couldn’t find documentation for the…
Note taken on [2025-07-31 Thu 21:03] Added icon settings in agenda A while back the Emacs Carnival started and July’s topic is writing experience. For me writing in Emacs means org-mode like for many others. A pleasant writing experience in org-mode for me includes nice looking org-mode buffers a.k.a. beautifying org-mode. Thus I’d like to share my current org-mode settings for…
I use scoop as a packet manager to install software on Windows. Updating the software just requires scoop update * which is really convenient. When I ran it just now this error message appeared. Loading gimp-3.0.2-setup-1.exe from cache. Extracting gimp-3.0.2-setup-1.exe ... ERROR Exit code was 2! Failed to extract files from C:\Users\mstem\scoop\apps\gimp\3.0.2-1\gimp-3.0.2-setup-1.exe. Log file:…
I use now Native graphical Emacs on Android since several months on my tablet and phone. I’m not aware of any specific packages to support the usage but want to share a few settings that I find quite helpful. Like the majority of Emacs users (judging from the configs people share) I turn off tool-bar and menu-bar on my desktop emacs. Contrary to a desktop emacs the tool-bar and menu-bar are…
Note taken on [2025-04-04 Fri 14:02] Small update: include a notification icon I’m a happy user of the native graphical Emacs on Android since several months now. Last week a Reddit user asked for experience and on particular if they can get notifications for their org agenda items. My initial reaction was “probably not” but I got curious and looked into it a bit. Turns out I was…
As part of Emacs 30 Emacs will run natively on Android. I had already used Emacs in terminal on Termux but a native graphical app seemed better and I decided to try it. It took me a bit of time to understand the explanations and get it to work. The following are my notes on how I did it. Maybe it’s useful for someone else as well.
I use Duplicati to backup data to a Nextcloud instance via WebDav which works reliable. Usually I update whenever I see the notification that a new update is available but this didn’t work well last time. I document it here since I couldn’t find anything on the Duplicati forum. Maybe it helps others searching for this problem. The update to 2.1.0.2 itself worked but afterwards the…
Note taken on [2024-12-07 Sat 14:57] Updated elisp code added. Like most people I prefer some eye-candy in Emacs. An important role here plays the fonts of course. For a while I just copied different fonts and settings in my emacs configuration. This had the disadvantage that I had to remember to add it accordingly whenever I used a different machine. Also I use MacOS, Linux and Windows and the…
One of the side effects of my recent changes to this website is that it no longer needs external scripts or the like. Thus it should be easy to add a Content Security Policy to this site.
It may seem odd to use a phone for managing a web site but I find it sometimes useful and definitely cool to have the option. Previously I only performed small changes such as fixing a typo which didn’t require a local test. Currently I try to understand Hugo better and thought to run it locally on the phone.
If you came to this website before you will notice a quite different design now. I’d like to explain why I implemented these changes and how I did it.
Since several years I prefer to generate documents from plain text which I then export to other formats. An crucial part is exporting to formats like PDF, Word or PowerPoint to share with others. Pandoc provides all this and is an awesome tool. The last years the format was Markdown in Dendron in Visual Studio Code where I used the vscode-pandoc plugin to convert markdown documents to Word or PDF.…
Johnny ‘Decimal’ Noble has created a compelling system to organise your life . While I don’t organise my complete life, it’s a hugely useful system to organise things at work. A while back, he wrote two blog posts on “classes of todo”, in which he discusses his ideas on how a similar solution might apply to todos. They’re definitely a good read and made me…
It’s been quite some time since I wrote this post and it’s somewhat outdated so I decided to update it. Background I started to use Dendron which is a fantastic knowledge management software based on Visual Studio Code. You write your notes in markdown and store them in so-called ‘vaults’. These can also be git repositories. After setting it up and working with a growing base of…
In the last months I started using Logseq as a digital note-taking tool mostly for journaling. Part of it’s appeal compared to Dendron is that it includes a decent mobile client both on iOS and Android. Then of course the question comes up how to sync the data between the different platforms. I tried a number of options and since this question comes up a lot on the forum and Discord I…
Recently there is a lot of buzz around “personal knowledge management” (PKM) or even building a so-called “second brain” which among other things means to collect and process knowledge often with the promise to make it easier to produce content. My intention for knowledge management is a bit more humble: I don’t want to spend time twice searching for and looking up…
Hardly a day goes by without news coverage of a high-profile data breach or successful attack. All these organisations include security teams that do their best to secure their IT environment. Some organisations may even lack the necessary focus on security or lack the required security budget. Nevertheless, why do all these data breaches occur? Maybe the majority of security teams concentrate on…
Intention I start this site to collect my thoughts on various topics and document things as I learn them. Privacy Policy Effective date: August 8, 2023 Martin’s Blog (“us”, “we”, or “our”) operates the mstempl.netlify.com website (the “Service”). This page informs you of our policies regarding the collection, use, and disclosure of personal…
Long time ago I studied math finishing with a PhD. While they are old and most likely not interesting for anyone here are the scientific papers (published and unpublished) that were the outcome. A Large Deviation Principle for Polynomial Hypergroups was published in the Journal of the London Mathematical Society. Large Deviations on One Dimensional Hypergroups Local limit_theorems for Markov…
I made two small changes to this blog: I removed the disqus comment functionality. If you want to comment on one of the posts or discuss it feel free to drop me a mail. I did this for mainly these reasons: It’s almost not used. Disqus had several privacy issues see the Wikipedia page . The fewer dependencies the better. I removed the link to Twitter as I no longer use it. If I figure out how…
In this post I want to share how I configure Visual Studio Code to support my note-taking and handling of task items within them. Since quite some time I use Dendron to collect ideas, topics to remember and as a journal. Taking notes during the day while working, in meetings and during conversations with others plays an important role. More often than not this means I need to take note of tasks I…
I suppose everyone needs to track the things they need to do. Since a long time I try to follow the getting things done method and its workflow . The basic assumptions are quite convincing and it helps me to be more confident that nothing falls through the cracks. Like others I tried and used lots of different tools to implement it over the years ranging from Outlook tasks to Emacs Orgmode and a…
At my previous company I had published a few blog posts and always thought “it’s a pity that the are gone now” since I still believe in the content. Last week I got reminded that the Internet Archive collects states of web pages from the past. And guess what: I found most of these old blog posts again. So I copied them and republished them here. Of course it would not have been a…
I use ssh a lot also on Windows for example to connect to Github or connect to Linux servers in the cloud and elsewhere. Many of these systems require an ssh_key and this can cause issues on Windows. VSCode for example has no means to let me enter the ssh passphrase so git pull/push fails. The solution for this is to use an ssh agent. I had set up the putty peagent long time ago and actually…
This is a text I posted some years ago on Linkedin. I still think this may be valuable so I’m reposting here even though the examples may appear a bit outdated. What use is attribution of cyber attacks? Each new breach makes everyone ask for attribution. I have to admit that I also follow all these blog posts attributing headline grabbing cyber attacks to different threat actors. A prime…
As I mentioned before I started using the fantastic note-taking tool Dendron a while back. It’s “hierarchy-first” approach and in particular the ease to find notes not only to create them is a big improvement over my previous attempts at note-taking with tools ranging from Evernote, and OneNote to plain-text tools like simplenote and of course org-mode. In all my previous…
Since a few months I’m an excited user of Dendron a note-taking and knowledge management tool based on VSCode and use it with git to synchronise between different machines and mobile devices . A recent conversation on Discord showed that it can be difficult for new joiners to get Dendron up and running with git so I thought to post a little tutorial how this can be achieved. I hope this is…
At first glance company culture and team culture seem to be obvious topics. Recently though a newly hired colleague asked me how I’d describe and rate the culture of our company and of our department. I struggled to find an answer. This got me thinking what culture really is and what makes a healthy culture. As usual I tried to find answers on the Internet which led me to…
This blog runs on hugo so I try to make use of hugo features. According to the hugo website modules are now recommended to insert content into a hugo site a simple and useful example being a theme . Since I use my personal fork of the minimal theme I decided to try this out. It’s quite easy to do. The main steps are: install Go run hugo mod init <module name> in the top directory. I just…
Why yet another blog? Aren’t there already enough (or maybe even too many) blogs on the Internet? Don’t we have enough experts to share their insights? All valid questions. However despite all this I try to post some of my thoughts as well. My motivation here is twofold: I came across a this post which includes the fascinating idea I might be able to think better by writing. Who…
Still some years ago many security professionals considered the cloud as a mostly dangerous and risky environment better to be avoided. At the same time more and more organisations started to move workloads to the cloud. This led to a mostly difficult situation: business and parts of IT rushed to the cloud without thinking of security and security tried to prevent this move or tried to secure the…
Last week I came across Upptime which is a very cool tool to monitor uptime and performance of websites. What I like particularly is that it runs purely on Github using Github Actions: no other service to register no chance the provider goes out of business (asuming of course Github remains online). I had used some software in the past to check for performance and uptime of websites but they were…