The Joy of Hardware

Last year Jfokus ran an embedded systems track alongside the main conference, and this was met with considerable enthusiasm. It was a friendly refuge from corporate keynotes and enterprise bloatware seminars, a place where you could escape the buzzwords and marketing people. I discovered that the Raspberry Pi was an actual thing that existed and could be ordered from the internet, and within 60 minutes I had done just that.

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Emacs Protip: org-mode

Man, where do I start? org-mode is Emacs’ Killer Application. It started out as an very capable outlining tool, but has grown and mutated and now people use it for time management, blogging, presentations, spreadsheets, GTD, you name it. Org-mode is the reason I returned to Emacs after several years as an Eclipse refugee. I needed a system for handling my ToDos, and after hearing good things about org-mode I installed Emacs again and gave it a go. And here I am several years later and I pretty much live and breathe Emacs now.

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Emacs Protip: ido-mode

If you are using emacs for anything more involved than editing config files every now and then you owe it to yourself try out a productivity enhancer like ido-mode. It lives in the minibuffer and provides way better completion for file names, emacs commands, buffers, you name it. Seriously, check it out if you haven’t already.

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My best friend

My best friend was a sometimes melancholy brown cat called Yojimbo. That wasn’t his actual name, but it was the one that stuck in my head as we pulled into the driveway to collect him. He was twelve weeks old.

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Inbox

It’s funny how things change. I used to hang out on a lot of mailing lists back in the day, some pretty high-volume ones. Two that come to mind were the Belle and Sebastian fan list and an extremely casual chat list for bored young IT professionals. I had my email client of choice (mutt) fired up and checked it obsessively throughout the day.

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Emacs Protip: sexp commands

After having internalized the other-window commands, I’m now focusing on commands working with balanced expressions (or s-expressions). Depending on the current buffer mode, this can be a word, a string literal, an XML tag or a LISP expression. The ones I’ve found most useful are:

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GOTY

I finished Fire Emblem: Awakening yesterday, and let me tell you: that is one fine game. My first impulse was starting over and playing it again, only with a strict ‘no reset’ policy (I admit I cheated a bit here and there the first time around). There’s also a comprehensive selection of DLC and post-game content that will keep me occupied for quite a while.

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