Recent Changes

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.

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.

2025-10-06

• 18:51 UTC (new) (history) 2025-10-06 A debug helper in Elisp . . . . mbork – A few days ago I was writing a pretty complex Elisp function which didn’t work correctly. My usual tool to use in such cases if of course Edebug – but in this case, it didn’t help much. One of the things my function did was messing around with buffers and windows, and this interferes with Edebug insisting on showing the source code in a specific window. In such cases, I miss the old-school “printf debugging”.

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