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.

2023-09-05

• 15:25 UTC (diff) (history) 2023-09-02 Irregular recurring TODOs in Org mode, part I . . . . mbork – add categories (minor)

2023-08-21

• 17:47 UTC (new) (history) 2023-08-21 My plans for 2023 - August update . . . . mbork – Since about two months have passed since the last blog post with my 2023 plans update, it’s time for another one. This time it is going to be a bit shorter, since not a lot of stuff has happened (or rather, a lot did, but it was mostly concentrated on one of the projects, which I think is… good?).

2023-08-05

• 09:15 UTC (new) (history) 2023-08-05 Plotting ASCII art charts from Org mode tables . . . . mbork – Three weeks ago I wrote about simple ASCII art charts in Emacs. Now I’m going to use Org mode tables as the source of the data for them.

2023-07-22

• 04:45 UTC (new) (history) 2023-07-22 Org Clive - a new Org-mode-based blogging engine . . . . mbork – As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I am now working on a new Org-mode based blog engine. I am proud to say that it’s now ready (even though it’s not yet feature complete), and you can use it, too!

2023-07-15

• 04:26 UTC (new) (history) 2023-07-15 Drawing ASCII art charts in Emacs buffers . . . . mbork – Two months ago I wrote about how I track my weight in Emacs. I am still doing it, and dieting works quite well, but I had one problem with my setup: I really wanted to have a graphical representation of my weight data – in other words, a chart. After quickly assessing the existing solutions (the chart.el library included in Emacs and Org Plot, I decided that I need something else. I don’t want to have to run an external program (in this case, gnuplot), and I want to have a simple ASCII art scatter plot (but neither a bar chart nor just an additional column containing a histogram of the values in the table.

2023-07-08

• 13:20 UTC (new) (history) 2023-07-08 Finding a common prefix of a set of strings . . . . mbork – Some time ago I needed a very specific thing. Given two strings, I wanted to find their longest common (initial) substring. For example, given abc and abd, I wanted ab. I thought that Emacs Lisp must have something like this already, and I wasn’t wrong. It turns out there are even two functions which can do that!

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