Technology

After considering Quarto for a long time (using instructions for the tarball version) and failing to make it work with Emacs properly, I decided to go all in on the computational notebook features of Org Mode. It is not that Quarto (with its .qmd files) does not work with my current setup. It does, and I was able to render something basic involving R, Python, and Julia using a complex setup (with Quarto using knitr along with reticulate and JuliaCall). But working with QMD files in Emacs was ugly. Quarto is designed for VSCode, Neovim, and others; the relevant Emacs package has not been updated in several years. ...

Notes on My Recent Exploration of Emacs I briefly tried to use Emacs Doom, but I quickly realized that configuring it properly would take up quite a while, and would involve deleting quite a lot. So I went back to modifying my own init file to suit my writing workflow. I saw that Doom divided up the config files by functionality, and I decided to give that a try. And so now my setup looks the way described below. Also, it has a lot more functionality than it did in my earlier basic config. ...

All I wanted was to use magit today, but Spacemacs, which I have used for years, wouldn’t allow me. I could not figure out what the problem was—it likely had something to with dependencies that were out of sync. Failing to resolve the issue, I decided to reinstall emacs and configure it from scratch (with some great LLM help). The fruits of this tinkering are in the init.el file below. It is only about 160 lines long, but covers the vast majority of my requirements surprisingly well. This is a brief log of how this config file came about. ...

Background I have been using the note-taking software, Obsidian, for a little more than a year, and it has been a major quality of life upgrade for me. Prior to this, I used Evernote for several years, thanks to the recommendation of Tim Ferriss. Initially, I was a happy customer, but over the years, the subscription costs mounted and the quality of the app degraded. I tested Joplin and Notion but they proved inadequate for my needs. Finally, I landed on Obsidian, finding it through the videos of No Boilerplate. My usage pattern has settled down enough over the past year for me to be able to discuss it. ...

Calendar A calendar is to be used for the following. Time blocking, Marking events that will occur regardless of your presence, Marking due dates. I am using the Full Calendar plugin. Every event is a separate note under a specific folder. The events appear in a calendar timeline. Task Manager A task manager is used for tracking all tasks associated with projects. Be as specific as you need to be. Tasks do not necessarily have due dates. Set scheduled dates and priority for tasks as required. ...

The Three Phases of Password Hosting For the longest time, I hesitated to use a password manager. Trusting a cloud service for such an important matter did not sit well with me. For years, I kept all my passwords in a notebook. This was the pen and paper phase. It worked, but over time, the content grew too large. Changing passwords got messy. And if I lost my notebook (which, fortunately, did not happen), I would be in trouble. Maintaining a backup ultimately meant taking photos and trusting internet-touching devices and internet-based services. ...

Just found out about this neat tool called imagemagick. I’m using it to compress jpg images small webp images for use on this blog. Install it (in arch-based linux) using this command. sudo pacman -S imagemagick Then run magick image.jpg -resize 1600x -quality 75 image.webp to create a compressed version of the image. Here the max pixel width is set at 1600 px, and the quality is at 75 (moderate compression). ...