In this post I talk about three great new features in the latest release of mu4e, an email programme that runs in Emacs. I also show my mu4e configuration as an example to others who would like a similar setup.
After recently discovering that plaintext format=flowed in Thunderbird works only partially, it was time to check back in on mu4e after my previous happy stint using it.
A core part of my note-taking strategy is a growing collection of Emacs Org mode files containing my monthly lab journals, project summaries and various technical documents.
Usually I rely on Projectile’s Helm integration to perform recursive searches with The Silver Searcher (ag) using helm-projectile-ag (trigged by the completely muscle-memorised C-c p s s) through all of the org files in my notes hierarchy. Recursive regular expression search results are shown interactively as you type. Wonderful!
If you want C++ completion and navigation (jump to definition, jump to declaration, and so forth), there are several good options for Emacs. For a QtQuick / C++ project I’m working on, I needed the best Emacs has to offer.
This turned out to be the Clang-based rtags system.
Rtags is not the easiest of the options to get going, hence this short tutorial. I initially configured irony-mode, which is also Clang-based and was significantly easier to get going, but it soon started hanging on the completion of for example QStringList methods in my project. Because it also doesn’t support navigation, I decided to try rtags. So far, rtags has been working quite well on a Qt 5.x project of slightly under 200K lines of C++.
When developing a mobile app using Cordova or PhoneGap, the browser target platform can really speed up your development. You could serve the HTML files directly using cordova serve, but the browser platform, while being almost as fast, is much closer to the Android / IOS environments your app will eventually find itself in. It also has access to the Cordova APIs.
My general workflow is that I keep cordova run browser running in a terminal window (this will initially start a new instance of chrome), and periodically run cordova prepare browser as I’m developing. This last step packages up the “app”, along with the cordova.js bits, for the browser platform.
ECL is of course Embeddable Common Lisp, a small but quite complete Common Lisp implementation that can be easily embedded in your C applications to act as dynamic extension language, but it is also a fine stand-alone implementation. It includes an interpreter and a compiler, and can even produce compact binaries. Read this blog post by Chris Kohlhepp for a brief and practical overview.
SLIME is the Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs, a great Emacs environment within which one can write code for a number of Common Lisp implementations.
Usually when I’m working on a Django project, I use the built-in runserver command. For deployment, we mostly use nginx and uwsgi in front of Django.
However, for a new side project I needed a local Django setup with a faster debug server. To keep things simple, I was looking for a pure Python solution that could serve static files, and did automatic reloading on source change, just like runserver.
Just in case you were wondering how one could go about having any child widget of a Kivy Scatter widget that would stick in a single window-relative position whilst the scatter itself was being translated and rotated, I thought I’d post this solution.
With a scatter, one can very easily implement a canvas-like object that can be rotated, translated and zoomed, whilst all of the widgets it contains are transformed along with it. This is usually great, unless you’d like, for some or other reason, to display a widget at a fixed position, for example any kind of overlay, such as a label.
Ever since I dropped Dropbox in September of 2013 due to mounting privacy concerns, I’ve been searching for and testing various filesystem syncing solutions to take its place.
This post is a summary of the notes I made during this time.
It’s quite hard finding reviews online that go deeper than the very surface. Most sync software reviews can be summarised as:
Hey, look, here’s a new service that’s a dropbox killer / dropbox alternatives / disruptive in the sync space. Wow, you get N gigabytes of free space, that’s more than dropbox. Look, it seems to be syncing these three files I put in there. That’s great. The End.
(This post has been updated since initial publication, see last section for details.)
My blog post on usable hardware-based SSD encryption has seen a great deal of activity. Although that post dealt primarily with the ATA security based type of hardware-based full drive encryption, readers from all over joined the discussion in the comments to talk about an increasing number of new self-encrypting drives supporting the TCG Opal standard.
For a project that I’m currently helping with, we needed recent OpenGL features that are only available on NVIDIA drivers with version 340 and later.
Unfortunately, I have one of those NVIDIA Optimus laptops. Up to now, Bumblebee worked a treat (I would recommend this system in most cases), but for this project I needed the whole of X to run on the NVIDIA, so I had to make use of nvidia-prime to switch between Intel and NVIDIA mode.