Recent Changes

2026-03-14

• 10:40 UTC (new) (history) 2026-03-14 Selecting a sample of a PostgreSQL table . . . . mbork – Today I have a nice SQL tip about sampling tables in SQL. (I’m writing about PostgreSQL as usual but this applies to other databases, too, since this feature is in the SQL standard.) Imagine you have a large table and you want to get a general feeling about what its contents look like.

2026-03-09

• 15:41 UTC (new) (history) 2026-03-09 Create ranges of numbers in vanilla JS . . . . mbork – Sometimes you need to create an array with the sequence of numbers, say from 0 to 9. Popular libraries like Lodash or Ramda have a function for that (in both cases, it’s called range), but how to do that concisely in vanilla JS? In case you’re wondering, both Lodash and Ramda use a while loop for this task; can we do better? (In this case “better” does not necessarily mean “faster”, but “shorter”, and – let’s be honest — “in a more clever/hackish/crazy way”.) It turns out that the answer is yes.

2026-03-02

• 16:39 UTC (new) (history) 2026-03-02 Lispy and Iedit . . . . mbork – A bit over a decade ago (!) I wrote about Iedit. It’s a very cool package, a bit similar to multiple cursors, very convenient for changing variable names (especially that it has a great feature where the change is restricted to the current function). I am also a Lispy user. Lispy requires Iedit (and has a binding for it different from the default one – M-i – while Iedit’s default I’m used to is C-;). The problem is, when I added Lispy to my Emacs, it disabled the default C-; (and only installed M-i in Elisp buffers). Now, I admit that M-i may be a better (or at least not worse) keybinding for Iedit than C-;. It’s default binding is tab-to-tab-stop, which is one of those useless commands Emacs has had probably for decades. Personally, I’m accustomed to C-;, so I wanted Lispy not to interfere with Iedit setting that keybinding.

2026-02-21

• 17:07 UTC (new) (history) 2026-02-21 Org links’ targets . . . . mbork – When I write blog posts containing several links (usually to Emacs documentation, sometimes to my other posts and sometimes to other websites), one of the things I do is to check if all the links are correct. Usually I just middle-click on every one of them in the browser and see if they lead to the right place. I thought, however, that it would be useful to be able to see where an Org link points to without actually going there.

2026-02-16

• 15:03 UTC (new) (history) 2026-02-16 Toy train timetable improvements – buttons . . . . mbork – A few weeks ago I wrote about my toy train timetable clock. I used it with my son a few times since then, and it worked great. However, some things that I imagined would be a good idea turned out to be a bit worse UI-wise.

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