Recent Changes

2023-09-30

• 19:17 UTC (new) (history) 2023-09-30 Confirming potentially dangerous actions . . . . mbork – A common situation is when I want to do something on my computer with possibly destructive consequences, like deleting a file, truncating a database table etc. One common approach to making sure this won’t happen accidentally is to require the user to press y or even type yes (this is what Emacs does with its y-or-n-p and yes-or-no-p functions). Some time ago I had a similar need in a shell script. I was afraid, however, that even requiring the user to type yes is not enough – it is easy to condition oneself to type a three-letter word without much thinking, after all.

2023-09-18

• 18:41 UTC (new) (history) 2023-09-18 Making Anki flashcards from subtitles . . . . mbork – Those of you who follow my blog know that one of my hobbies is translating subtitles. The main reason I do this is to watch stuff with my daughter, who doesn’t yet speak English fluently. Some time ago it dawned on me that I can use my translations twice. Not only can I watch films and tv series with her, but I can use them to help her learn English.

2023-09-02

• 11:52 UTC (new) (history) 2023-09-02 Irregular recurring TODOs in Org mode, part I . . . . mbork – Some time ago I mentioned a very peculiar type of TODOs I’d like to implement. These are things I’d like to do from time to time, but not necessarily on a regular basis. A canonical example is an inspirational blog post I’d like to reread once in a while. I admit that this idea is inspired by spaced repetition, where things I want to remember are presented to me repeatedly, but with increasing intervals. Here, however, the situation is a bit different.

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