Marcin Borkowski: Recent Changes

Updates in the last 30 days

2025-11-10

14:40 UTC (new) (history) 2025-11-10 ASCII art timeline diagrams . . . . mbork – A few weeks ago I was desiging some time-related code, and that code needed to handle “events” happening on various days. Without getting into too . . .

2025-11-03

18:57 UTC (new) (history) 2025-11-03 Beeminder Org timer . . . . mbork – Once I wrote about what I called “Org mode burst timer”, another idea occurred to me. That code is good, and may be useful for some people – if it is for you, feel free to use it! But I can do something better for me. Instead of requiring myself to set the burst property manually, I could tie this code to my Emacs Beeminder client. When a clock is started on a beeminded task, it could retrieve the necessary data about the goal associated with the current headline and notify me when I work on it enough.

2025-10-27

15:20 UTC (new) (history) 2025-10-27 Org mode burst timer . . . . mbork – Preview: Org mode has two built-in timers – the “relative timer” (which is basically a stopwatch – it starts with 0 and counts up), useful for taking meeting minutes with an indication of when things were discussed, and a “countdown timer” (which is, well, a countdown timer – you tell it a duration, it counts down from it, and rings a bell when it gets to zero). What I sometimes miss is the following feature. I’d like to have some kind of timer which would tell me when a given amount of time passed, but then it would keep running. For instance, let’s assume that I want to write this blog post for at least 25 minutes, but also measure the time I spend doing it even if I keep writing for longer.
15:20 UTC (new) (history) 2025-10-20 Org mode burst timer . . . . mbork – Deleted 2025-10-20_Org_mode_burst_timer

2025-10-20

19:13 UTC (new) (history) 2025-10-20 A class register in Org Mode . . . . mbork – My 9-year-old son loves playing school. He’s got a whiteboard, Mom, Sister and Dad are his pupils and he teaches them various real or made-up things. At the beginning he checks attendance, using a long list of made-up pupils’ names. Some time ago he decided that he’d like to keep the attendance data in a digital form. Mom helped him make a MS Word document (I know, I know…), where he puts little minuses for absentees and pluses for the attendees.

2025-10-13

05:43 UTC (new) (history) 2025-10-13 Grouping rows by values in a column . . . . mbork – A few days ago I needed to analyze some tabular data where some rows where grouped in a natural way. Imagine for example a database table which stores events, and every event is related to a user. For example, it could have a user_id column, a timestamp column and an event_type column. I want to see all the events, but events related to different users should be visually spearated (as they are completely unrelated). A natural way would be to sort the data by user_id first and by timestamp next. Ideally, groups of events related to different users would be separated by e.g. an empty row.