From Pexels Karolina Grabowska

I’ve been using emacs for a long time. OK, I’ve probably been using emacs for over 30 years. However, I’ve never really taken a huge amount of time to learn emacs. I’ve picked up a few packages along the way

• ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics) and various *-polymode packages
• magit
• org-mode and more recently org-roam

I’ve also spent time adjusting a development environment as necessary, which most recently has included …

I had partitioned my development environment such that I had virtual machines providing:

• R and R-studio
• A PostgreSQL server
• A development machine

This basically avoided some package clashes when “tinkering”. There is however some clumsiness (I need lots of PostgreSQL clients all over the place). So the current cunning plan is to run some of this inside Docker.

The first step was adding a GPG key and the docker repositories. I seemed to faff around a bit but I …

From Pexels Wendy Wei

I do have one little problem with sqitch. I am so used to typing a letter u after a letter q that I regularly mistype the command as squitch, and then end up staring at the terminal for so long I wonder if I should have typed sqint. Very minor naming issues aside, the project has a website at www.sqitch.org. I’ve found it a simple and specific database migration tool which does as much as I want and no more. It’s written in Perl and …

From Pexels

David Allen the consultant and author (sadly not Dave Allen the comedian) promotes a management system in his book “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity”. In my opinion, there are two key features to this system. The first is learning to use a tracking system rather than carrying things in your head. The second is taking the time to review, prioritize and delete actions from this tracking system. So it isn’t just writing …

Anonymous from Pinterest

After some 12 years, I had to set up a new machine for my own use. I bought a reconditioned HP with around 16Gb RAM, 500Gb SSD. It came with a Windows OS, which I was going to wipe out. However, for various reasons (mainly some wonderful animation apps I use in teaching which require Mac or Windows only and need access to the sound system) I decided to keep the Windows host. First off, I decided to install my development machine under …