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.
read the rest →Org mode, LaTeX, and tagged PDFs: producing accessible documents
Many of us in higher education use Emacs to produce course materials, and these must conform to the accessibility requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. We often export Org mode documents to LaTeX to produce very nice PDF output. But until very recently, LaTeX could not produce tagged PDFs that conform to the PDF/UA accessibility standard. Until how recently? Only starting with TeX Live 2025.
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