pages tagged geekspwhittonhttps://spwhitton.name//tag/geek/spwhittonikiwiki2015-11-18T17:09:12ZEmacs and a tiling window managerhttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/framesonlymode/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2015-06-20T00:45:00Z
<p><a href="http://spw.sdf.org/blog/writing/geek/emacsevildone.html">Six months
ago</a> I
activated the Emacs Vim Emulation Layer, EVIL, and tried to go back to
the vim keybindings I used years ago, before <a href="http://mph.puddingbowl.org/2010/02/org-mode-in-your-pocket-is-a-gnu-shaped-devil/">Org-mode dragged me into
Emacs</a>
like it does so many. <a href="http://spw.sdf.org/blog/writing/thoughts/backtoemacs.html">I found
that</a> it
didn’t suit me: the Emacs keybindings turned out to be more deeply wired
into my fingers, and I was no longer convinced by the idea of the Vim
zen cult (no hard feelings guys, you’re cool). One thing that I found
when configuring EVIL was that although my configuration for the Vim
emulation was complicated, I could strip out a lot of other stuff from
my Emacs configuration that I was using to work around Emacs not being
that great at editing text. I learnt something from this despite
deactivating EVIL again, a lesson I’ve applied again this week.</p>
<p><a href="https://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/framesonlymode/#more">continue reading this entry</a></p>
Follow-up to three years with Emacs posthttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/emacsevildone/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2014-10-19T13:08:00Z
<p>On Friday we had no lessons and I had some free time. I decided to go
ahead and wrestle the Emacs vim emulation layer Evil into my Emacs
configuration due to having two ideas.</p>
<p><a href="https://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/emacsevildone/#more">continue reading this entry</a></p>
Almost three years with Emacshttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/emacsevil/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2014-10-15T22:41:00Z
<p>I used vim for I think some of 2009, and most of 2009 and 2010. Then
there was a brief period of Emacs with poor vim emulation, which ended
in January 2011 when I begin using Emacs bindings full time. I’ve been
doing that ever since, for almost three years. Nowadays a lot of vim
users are switching to Emacs because of the rise of Evil, a really solid
vim emulation layer in Emacs that is much more satisfying than its
predecessors.</p>
<p>I’m considering following in the footsteps of those vim users, by
returning to vim keybindings in Emacs.
<a href="https://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/emacsevil/#more">continue reading this entry</a></p>
Fourth year computinghttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/fourthyearcomputing/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2012-05-08T20:13:00Z
<p>I’ve been daydreaming more and more about returning to normal studying,
i.e. not revision, next term. One thing I have been thinking about is
computing. I have learnt through revision that I write too many notes in
studying, because I only refer back to some of them. Yet I need to write
when reading or I won’t remember as much with which to write an essay.
To make myself produce less text, therefore, I think it might be best to
go back to handwritten notes. This means that I don’t need to carry a
laptop around anymore, which is great.</p>
<p><a href="https://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/fourthyearcomputing/#more">continue reading this entry</a></p>
Storing my files at SDFhttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/sdffiles/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2012-04-30T22:02:00Z
<p>As previously mentioned I am in the process of moving all my online
stuff, which basically comes down to web hosting, e-mail hosting, small
file syncing and large file storage, to <a href="http://sdf.org/">SDF</a>. The main
SDF server cluster is a bunch of NetBSD boxes with home directories, web
directories and mailspools all mounted via NFS, with fairly tight
quotas: as someone at the top level of membership, I only receive 250MB
on each of the mounts.</p>
<p>However as of today a new cluster has been opened with an absurd amount
of storage, initially offering 100GB storage for every MetaARPA member,
and it’s set to rise with time:</p>
<pre><code>-bash-4.1$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_ma-lv_root
50G 3.1G 44G 7% /
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1 485M 69M 392M 15% /boot
/dev/mapper/vg_ma-lv_src
51G 6.8G 42G 15% /src
/dev/mapper/ma0-rd0 4.5T 6.4G 4.5T 1% /meta
</code></pre>
<p>…though as you can see the disk space isn’t being much made use of yet.
I imagine that eventually MetaArray will become the cluster for MetaARPA
users, but for now at least, I am treating my data on the two clusters
very differently and separately. Here’s a write-up of how I’m making use
of my space and keeping it secure.</p>
<p><a href="https://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/sdffiles/#more">continue reading this entry</a></p>
Why I'm not PGP-signing everything anymorehttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/notgpgeverything/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2012-04-22T16:40:00Z
<p>Since September 2005 I’ve had a PGP key, a cryptographic identity that
allows me to use PGP for purposes of (a) encrypting things to myself and
others (b) digitally signing messages. I use (a) on backups and on a
private notes file on my computer, and very occasionally I encrypt an
e-mail to a friend that has passwords or something in it.</p>
<p><a href="https://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/notgpgeverything/#more">continue reading this entry</a></p>
Closing down my personal infrastructurehttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/sdf/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2012-04-21T14:10:00Z
<p>Over the past three or four years I’ve been slowly building a little
digital empire for myself, by linking together various computers in
interesting ways. I run my own e-mail, web hosting (quite independently
of SilentFlame, the charitable web hosting organisation I run), DNS and
Jabber, and with my friends have a private VPN, a sort of Internet of
our own, where we have web addresses like <a href="http://zephyr.athenet/">http://zephyr.athenet/</a> for
my desktop computer.</p>
<p><a href="https://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/sdf/#more">continue reading this entry</a></p>
Researching e-readershttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/ereader/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2011-08-10T20:29:00Z
<p>Either through selling DnD books (not going so well so far…) or by
asking for it for my 21<sup>st</sup>, I would like to get an e-reader at
some point in the next six months. My sister finds this surprising,
because “you don’t read” which is true in terms of non-academic books,
but actually I spend at least two hours a day reading blogs and news
websites (well, one website) online per day, and so I think a more
comfortable platform would let me expand this since I do so hate
extended reading off a bright screen.</p>
<p>Everyone tells me that Amazon’s Kindle is “the best” e-reader and I get
the impression this opinion is decisive. Of course I share Stallman’s
extreme dislike for the platform, but if it really is that good I’m not
these are overriding for me: there is no completely free-as-in-freedom
platform available, and crucially my e-reader wouldn’t be something that
dealt in data that matters to me. I would never buy an ebook stuffed
with DRM; I’d get it from sources which kept me in control, then all I’m
doing it copying the book onto the device to make use of it. Similarly
when reading web stuff, I’d hack up my own script to send a page that’s
come in via RSS over to the e-reader or something; it’s just a place to
store things and then read them. If I chose a Kindle I think I’d see it
as a service I’m buying for however long Amazon keeps it going, rather
than a permanent investment as I see a computer.</p>
<p>In taking such an approach I suspect that I’d be losing out on all the
“my Kindle downloads everything I want to read automatically before I’ve
got up” stuff. A quick Google reveals some possibilities. My old
<a href="http://old.notes.sean.whitton.me/2010/09/readinglist-py.html">readinglist.py
script</a>
could be put together with
<a href="http://danielchoi.com/software/kindle-feeds.html">kindle-feeds</a>, for
example. If this became a massive hack that I actually had to put time
into and that tended to break I’d be losing everything I’d wanted out of
an e-reader, though.</p>
<p>Other alternative readers? Only the Sony PRS stands out as being able to
read anything and not having a wasteful keyboard. Undecided on whether I
want 3G.</p>
<p>A lot of people say that they really like books and wouldn’t want to
give them up; just wanted to note that this doesn’t apply to me at all.
Maybe I once cared about this but I Just Don’t anymore. Indeed I rather
like the impossibility of breaking an e-reader’s spine since it doesn’t
have one.</p>
<p>I’ll continue to investigate.</p>
Returning to Minecrafthttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/returningtominecraft/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2011-04-09T09:39:00Z
<p>I’ve started playing Minecraft again, with a few differences. First of
all I’m straight-up cheating because I’m versioning my save files, so I
can roll back any time I like, and this is a game that is designed not
to let you undo your mistakes. But the reason for this is that I am sick
of creepers wrecking my stuff, basically; while I am occasionally
careless and I lose a load of diamond into the lava, this is rare and
what is far more common is that a creeper sneaks up and blows up on the
surface, and this frustrates me because it obviously messes up stuff
I’ve built but also messes up the really cool natural land formations.
There’s still an element of risk to the game because I’m only saving
like this after completing a task or a mining session or whatever, so I
can still lose progress by being forced to rollback because I haven’t
checked in for a while.</p>
<p>I’m also being rather more industrious. I’m not expanding naturally by
doing what I normally do: dig a little cave, flesh it out with furniture
and then dig a shaft straight downwards at the back, and then one
upwards and build a lookout tower or something on top of the hill.
Instead I’m planning my digging to get resources rather than to find
caves, because I’m more interested in building cool stuff on the surface
now. My mine is separate to my house: I didn’t mine for ages when
starting, building up a wooden house with a bed (meaning no random
monsters all over the place which is win) on the first few days and then
only after being well-established finally starting the hunt for coal.
And now I’m strip mining for cobblestone and diamond.</p>
<p>The world I’ve got is really cool-looking and I’m looking forward to
linking things up with cart networks and then building massive towers
and castles and suchlike, gradually.</p>
<p>Here’s a quick screenshot of my woodland retreat. Currently digging up a
sunken garden to the (arbitrary) north linked to this by a tunnel.</p>
<p><img src="https://spwhitton.name//blog/img/returningtominecraft.png" alt="returningtominecraft.png" /></p>
<p>Finding these on YouTube last night in this order made me laugh:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DNYsfTUfIVhg">My EPIC Self-Harvesting Cactus Farm (690+
cacti/hour)</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DgId95-jrg8I">Cactus Farm 5184 Cactus Per
Hour</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DDYYy99_W754">Minecraft cacti farm 43200 cacti per
hour</a></p>
Grokking Org-mode and putting it in chargehttps://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/grokkingorg/2015-11-18T17:09:12Z2011-04-02T11:43:00Z
<p>Some time ago I was looking for a decent outlining tool to take academic
notes electronically, and then I got myself into Org-mode and
consequently Emacs and away I went and I’ve <a href="http://old.spw.sdf.org/blog/2011/02/mixed-organisational-success.html">chatted about this stuff
before</a>,
but it’s only pretty recently that I’ve actually settled on a fairly
complex Org-mode setup that suits my way of working. When I started out
I adopted bits and pieces from all over, mainly from the excellent
<a href="http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html">norang.ca doc</a> (look at your
scrollbar), but I didn’t know enough about the software and what parts
are more significant than others, and I didn’t know my own working
habits well enough. But I’ve got a better picture of those now and
recently I started having ideas of how I could make things better. So I
sat down and reworked everything and I have grown Org-mode up to my
needs (crucially: not any higher).</p>
<p>There is a lot of stuff around online about productivity; there was a
<a href="http://xkcd.com/874/">recent xkcd</a> about the typical cynical view of
all this. While I have read some of this stuff, and can see that people
with less traditional working schedules than a student’s may find things
like GTD allow them to make better use of their time, but in general I
tend to be rather cynical (wow! what a surprise!) about it all myself
because it’s wonderfully easy to read about this stuff and feel better
about yourself rather than actually do whatever it is you need to do.
And it’s vital to recognise that these things might have a small
motivational effect (setting yourself up properly to do something means
you’re more likely to do it) but they’re not going to help motivate you
in general. But as I intend to write properly about soonish, I do not
have issues with motivation in a big way. My current issues are more
focused than that and while a lack of success does feed back into my
motivation to keep going and my tendency to procrastinate, it’s
secondary to the issue itself.</p>
<p>So why do I spend a great deal of time setting up my organisational
systems? My perfectionism is a factor, and as I have said there is some
small motivational boost from having a list of things to tick off, as we
are all familiar with. The two main reasons for me are because I don’t
trust my memory, and because I want control, and this is rather directed
and specific. The first reason is self-explanatory. Org-mode allows me
to tie everything together electronically and does what I can’t trust my
memory to do. I am slowly getting better at taking the decision not to
trust my head and to leave it free to try and figure out how to study
Philosophy again, and instead let the computer keep track of pretty much
everything. While it might be more romantic to have nice notebooks or
the ruled refill pad that screams conscientious-and-unpretentious (you
should hear the conversations I have with myself on these things), it
isn’t actually as good as storing things in a system one has built
oneself that one understands, a system of plain text backed up and
synced between computers (not “devices”, computers). I don’t need to
remember what I’m supposed to be doing because Org-mode can tell me, and
I don’t need to remember what’s going on because I read my e-mails/wrote
things down and pumped them back into Org-mode — anywhere in my Org
files, and they get brought together and organised automatically — and
it tells me what I need to know. I over-exaggerate here. I still know
what I’m doing and can tell you what’s important to me this week, and
whether I’m on track, and I can give you an idea of what that e-mail
said about that upcoming event. But I fall back to something that is
complete and tailored to suit me and my life like a glove.</p>
<p>My second reason is about control, and it’s about control of my own time
and life in the face of the distractions that hit at us from all sides
in this world of the consumption of gratifying activities to fill the
hours between sleeping. I am fortunate that I am already removed from
cheap social gratification, choosing quality communication with friends
over constant electronic connection via phones and social networking
websites, so I avoid a certain amount of banal chatter, egoism, ranking
of one’s life against others etc. Not being materialist I’m not
surrounded with toys of various descriptions. But the Internet beckons,
oh how it beckons. There are many fascinating websites out there and one
can get a great deal out of browsing around the place, but the issue for
me is more specific than just spending time reading because, unless one
has something else to do, that’s fine. It’s very rare that I allow my
browser to distract me from working on something in this way. Instead, I
find myself possessed with a need to know or to make use of pieces of
knowledge on specific areas of interest for me. Perhaps this will be
best illustrated by examples relating to the present: Emacs, Org-mode
and Gnus feature prominently. Page with some keybindings from Emacs, not
all of which I know? Must spend time absorbing them. Page with a Gnus
feature that I’m not aware of (happened today with tree mode)? Must
evaluate and assimilate feature into workflow. Article on typography
about how one should typeset footnotes? Must see if my LaTeX templates
need updating <em>right now</em>. Article on a philosophical topic that I have
a strong opinion on? Better read it <em>now</em>. And so on.</p>
<p>All of these things are valuable. I’m pursuing the things that interest
me and learning more about how others see the same subjects and that’s
great, but the issue is that when one goes off down the rabbit hole for
a while one hands over control of what one things is important to one’s
surroundings and less conscious inclinations. There is already too much
in my life, and I can’t do everything. My Org-mode setup helps me with
this in two ways. Firstly, it tells me what I’ve already decided is
important to do today, and it tells me the projects I currently have in
progress, and it reminds me that unless I want to make a decision to
change my mind, this is what I’ve committed to and this is what the real
Sean wants, not the temperamental Sean possessed by the excitement of
the ability to join two lines and remove the indentation or whatever.
Secondly, Org-mode keeps track of interesting things for me and allows
me to bring them up. Not sure if I should be reading this but don’t feel
comfortable just throwing it aside, and need to get it out of the way in
order to focus in on the day’s tasks? No problem, hit a few keys and
store it away in my Org files, tagged so that it can be brought up in a
list with a few keystrokes.</p>
<p>The response to this, if you don’t like it, is to talk about how a
certain flexibility and spontaneity is lost when one rigs oneself up to
a schedule when one doesn’t strictly need to. Productivity in the sense
of ticking things off on a list of tasks that are considered good
doesn’t have to come first, and if you’re at a time in your life when
you can be a little more free and perhaps achieve less then you should
take advantage of this and float a little more. I don’t think any
flexibility goes anywhere though, it’s merely made more thoughtful. If I
decide that something else is genuinely more important, running things
via my Org-based system forces me to evaluate my own inclinations of the
moment critically against the other things I’ve said I’ll do. I can
still decide to change things up in any way I like and Org is flexible
enough to make this very easy to do. But I’m back in control, which is
good; saying otherwise is probably just over-romanticising life in the
modern world. And secondly, I am made very unhappy if I feel I am
unproductive. With Org-mode I can see my productivity, am happier and
thus more productive and indeed everything else goes better.</p>
<p>My goal right now is to take things to the extreme by rigging myself to
Org-mode in all my dealings. For the next 30 days I’m forcing myself to
make it almost an obsession, so that I can reap the full benefits. Then
to regain some flexibility I will be able to slack off, but hopefully
I’ve have figured out what level to go to in order to gain the
above-described benefits.</p>
<p>I’ll end with a brief description of my system, since I keep referring
to it and as I say I’ve put a good deal of time and effort and thought
into it lately to grow it up to my needs and ways of working and the
kind of things I do. I have a number of core Org files relating to
various aspects of my life; the main ones are <code>Academic.org</code> for degree
work and related, <code>Oxford.org</code> for all the other stuff I do during term
time (so not got much going on at the moment), the almighty
<code>TechNotes.org</code> which contains so many notes, links and plans for
computer geek stuff and then my catch-all miscellaneous <code>Sean.org</code> which
has errands, political notes, ideas for TV shows, films, music and books
to look into and the like. Deep in my directory hierarchy there are
things like <code>~/doc/work/philos/history/Hume.org</code> which has all my notes
and tasks on Hume. It’s hard to get the balance right between how much
one needs to organise and separate one’s files (an interesting blog post
on this is to be found <a href="http://tychoish.com/essay/org-mode/">here</a>;
<a href="http://tychoish.com/essay/mobile-emacs/">this</a> is amusing by the same
author), but things are made easier because Org-mode is at its heart a
piece of outlining software, and outlining models how you think, so a
certain amount of organisation just happens automatically as long as you
remember to use the keybinding that inserts headings as well as the keys
that type text.</p>
<p>But the bigger reason why this doesn’t matter that much is the other
component of the system which is Org’s agenda view. This thing is
amazing, pulling together tasks from across your Org files, arranging
them according to useful metrics such as tags, scheduled dates and
deadlines, adding warnings for upcoming deadlines and the like, and then
pulling in appointments from either Org-mode itself or an external
calendar program, birthdays and wedding anniversaries from your address
book and finally it even adds results from Google Weather if you have
<a href="http://julien.danjou.info/google-weather-el.html">the right elisp</a>. The
key thing I’ve done recently, perhaps, has been realising the
significance of the agenda and how building one’s system and
customisations around that view rather than around the Org files
themselves, which organise themselves as much as is necessary, is the
key to success.</p>
<p>The word “agenda” doesn’t do this tool justice. I have four blocks to
mine, and you can view something that looks a bit like it
<a href="http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ball3162/agenda.html">here</a>. At the top I have a
list of the tasks I’ve marked as in progress. This has two kinds of
things in it: tasks that I am actually working on right now/today, and
also so-called “stuck projects”, which come out in a different colour
(not so on the above-linked export, unfortunately). Below that I have a
list of tasks that are waiting on responses from other people. It’s
important to look at these each day to see if people need reminding or
can be relied upon to just get it done, and it wouldn’t be so good to
have these show up as ordinary TODOs. Below that I have my
appointments/calendar events, weather, scheduled tasks, daily “habits”
or things I wish to accomplish regularly and repetitively, accompanied
by coloured progress charts, and then at the very bottom I have a list
of all undated TODO items.</p>
<p>Hidden from view are items marked as SOMEDAY. This is a task that
doesn’t actually need to be done, unlike a TODO, but that it would be
nice to be done — this is Org keeping track of interesting things for
me. I bring these up in different categories with other agenda
keybindings. And last of all there is my buffer of tasks to refile.
These are links and notes I have shoved into Org-mode quickly and
unceremoniously and without organisation, and once per day I move them
into the appropriate <code>.org</code> files.</p>