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It all started innocuously enough with this post from Alex Shroeder https://octodon.social/@kensanata/101052266709264418 Writing tools. Emacs Wiki What about you? I spontaneously replied. Emacs Orgmode Nikola This reminded me that since, I had recently migrated my desktop from Arch Linux to Fedora 29, I needed to reinstall Nikola and check that the blog I never use still could be built successfully. Oh - how exciting. Nikola has recently released version [8.0.1] Nikola-8 and I was on the previous version - 7....

I was in a fog, I didn’t notice everything Was coming all apart inside of me There wasn’t anyway for anyone to settle in You made a slow disaster out of me There’s a radiant darkness upon us I don’t want you to worry I was careful but nothing is harmless Baby, you better hurry You were a kindness when I was a stranger But I wouldn’t ask for what I didn’t need...

When I initially revisited Emacs, I used mu4e (instead of Thunderbird) for my email. I used the wonderful Gmane service to read mailing lists in Gnus and Elfeed to read blogs and RSS feeds within Emacs. This worked fine but after a while it became a little tiresome having to remember different key bindings to essentially perform the same repetitive tasks; reading messages, navigating (next/previous) messages, moving messages, saving messages, marking messages, deleting messages, searching messages, forwarding messages, replying to messages and occasionally composing brand new messages....

birth At the tantalising climax of the last episode, I was invited by Steve for a whistle-stop tour of Emacs. Steve explained that the main reason he used Emacs was pure laziness. Naturally, this immediately got my attention. He explained: ‘I’m lazy. It’s not a fault. It’s a fact. Most decent programmers are lazy. You’re lazy’. ‘Hang on, just a minute ! What do you mean - I’m lazy ?’...

the early years 1962 Entered the world as I intend to leave it. Kicking, screaming, naked, held upside down by a nurse slapping me on the backside. a night at the Lesser Free Trade Hall 1977 Wrote my first basic program in BASIC on a Tandy TRS-80. Editing facilities were fairly limited. I think to modify Line 10, you had to simply re-enter Line 10. In its entirety. This was rather time consuming, tiresome and almost put me off computers for life....

I have used the Unix bash shell for many years. As I am incredibly lazy and forgetful, I have become accustomed to using ctrl-r ‘find’ to find and scroll though the latest ‘find’ commands I have issued. Occasionally, I noticed that a lengthy, complex, useful ‘find’ command’ (which I mercilessly plagiarised from a clever person via Google) was no longer in my shell history. Investigations revealed the default bash history is a paltry 1000 commands so I decided to increase this to 10000 by adding the following line to ‘~/....

I had been contemplating and researching the purchase of a dedicated Network Attached Storage (NAS) for a long time. Initially, I considered a few different options; an entry level unit like a Synology DiskStation, a small server like the HP Gen 8 Microserver or Dell T20 and installing the disks or even buying the individual components and building the unit myself. However, I’m pretty useless with hardware and as a NAS should be high quality, reliable and solid, I decided to purchase a ready made unit....

On Thursday, a friend offered me two unwanted corporate tickets for the FA Cup Final at Wembley. I gleefully accepted and offloaded the second ticket within minutes. Saturday dawned cloudy and overcast. I realised I’d planned the journey for a traditional 3pm kick-off. I had the tickets in my hand although it was a bit weird for something so valuable and sought after to be printed out on my mate’s cheap inkjet printer....

I recently had to re-install my work laptop with Oracle Linux 7. With backups, it didn’t take too long to reinstall. The most time consuming task was compiling Emacs 24.5 from source. Emacs 24.5 is required for the excellent Prelude starter kit I have recently adopted. There are a lot of pre-requisite packages for Emacs that are available (but not included) in Oracle Linux 7. As part of the ‘Emacs for Everything’ experiment, I have also started to use an Emacs package called ‘elfeed’ to read RSS feeds and while it worked in my new, shiny environment, I noticed it ran much slower then previously....

This is the famous ‘Hello world’ program written in Python in colour using Markdown. #!/usr/bin/env python import sys def hello(name='world'): greeting = "hello " + name print(greeting) if __name__ == "__main__": hello(*sys.argv[1:]) This took me a long time to get working.