My first advice! (in Emacs Lisp)
It was really fun to learn about
advising Lisp functions
to extend functionality in Emacs. My first use case was to run a custom function every time a certain function in
Bastian Bechtold’s
org-static-blog is called. Of course, I could customize that function directly in my own fork, but Lisp advice allows you to modify functions without clobbering them directly. This approach has aesthetic and practical advantages.
Replacing Cinnamon with GNOME on Linux Mint Debian Edition
I loyally enjoy running Debian Stable. I am with less enthusiasm accustomed to GNOME, after years of habit and customizations on which I have come to rely. But Debian has some disadvantages: for me, it was that (apparently) GRUB was not always configured correctly after installation to a random laptop. Meanwhile Linux Mint (inlcuding LMDE) installs are always solid. And I am too thick to troubleshoot GRUB. I found that I can have the best of both worlds.
read the rest →What Black History Month means to me
I was in high school during the 1980s. In a little rural town in Ohio where casual racism was perfectly commonplace. Black History Month had been around for 15 years, and people already loved to complain about “Isn’t EVERY month Black History Month?”
read the rest →Custom sorting of mu4e headers
I love mu4e for dealing with email under Emacs. It’s a great package itself, but of course the killer feature is that it’s Emacs, and with a little Emacs Lisp you can make it do email how you want to do email. I mean I know you don’t want to do email, but still.
The cowardice of the powerful: educational leadership in DEI
Every year my institution measures faculty productivity by requiring us to submit a report of our annual activities. This year I noticed that two sections had silently disappeared.
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