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grokson GNU Units

Emacs has org-mode, and org-mode has tables with formulas which can invoke calc-mode. calc-mode also has units:

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/calc/Uni...

grokson Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation

A bit of Fry and Laurie, on language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg

grokson Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

With the built-in winner-mode you can go back to the previous window layout with C-c left.

grokson Command Line, Console and UI Based Open Source Plain Text Accounting

> (H)Ledger does not support recurring transactions.

https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Periodic-Tra...

grokson 'Using Emacs' Series

Use your thumb.

grokson Microsoft’s Surface Pro 5 Said to Move to Intel Kaby Lake Processors

> The things that I don't feel as comfortable with are basically UI things and application launching. I love Cmd-space to launch stuff on OSX, and hitting the Windows key to search for stuff to launch just feels sluggish in comparison.

In Gnome, Hit the Windows key and start typing 'shortcut' to run the keyboard shortcut editor.

Start typing 'application' to search-ahead-find the 'Show all applications' shortcut and click it.

Press Cmd-space.

grokson What makes us Red Hat

  cat << EOF > ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css

  /* Make window title bars more compact.
   *
   * From: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/276951
   */

  headerbar entry,
  headerbar spinbutton,
  headerbar button,
  headerbar separator {
      margin-top: 2px; /* same as headerbar side padding for nicer proportions */
      margin-bottom: 2px;
  }

  EOF

grokson Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-mir.html

grokson My Text Editor Journey: Vim, Spacemacs, Atom and Sublime Text

If you enable server-mode you can run gui emacs to get the icon in the doc and pop up a gui window when you drop something on it, while also connecting in a terminal.

grokson Grappling with Go

> The true metric for success for something like ntpsec is the number of meaningful security problems ntpd has been vulnerable to since ntpsec's inception that ntpsec hasn't been.

They talk about 3 areas where bugs have been removed, including:

  Much of ntpd’s most convoluted code lives in ntp_proto.c, which
  implements the state machine central to the protocol. Of the 29
  vulnerabilities that have received CVEs so far in 2016, a couple
  of multi-KLOC functions in ntp_proto.c are responsible for 15 of
  them — just over half. Of course, "just rip it out" wouldn’t
  suffice in this case: this is core business logic, not junk code.
  So we rewrote those functions from scratch, cutting line count
  considerably and yielding a far more readable result.

https://blog.ntpsec.org/2016/12/13/fantastic-bugs-and-where-...

The other two areas are guaranteed bug-free because they removed the code.

grokson 25% of CEOs’ Time Is Spent on Tasks Machines Could Do

We've already got virtual pop stars. Why not a virtual CEO?

https://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2016/04/waving-glow-s...

RIM had a par of co-CEOs. Why not buy one CEO from IBM, and hire another to play golf?

grokson Systemd's slowly but steadily increased idealism about the world

Some lid switches are broken:

https://who-t.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/libinput-and-lid-switch...

grokson The Many, the Humble, the Ubuntu Users

> it lacks several packages that I use (Kodi comes to mind

    $ dnf search kodi
    kodi.x86_64 : Media center
    ...

> They also changed the package manager from Yum, so a lot of new things to learn since I last used 17

    $ yum search kodi
    Redirecting to '/usr/bin/dnf search kodi' (see 'man yum2dnf')

    kodi.x86_64 : Media center
    ...

grokson YouTube no longer supports 4K video playback in Safari

    $ youtube-dl --list-formats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeJLzyxZqbk | grep '[0-9]x[0-9]'
    278          webm       256x144    DASH video   93k , webm container, vp9, 24fps, video only, 1.09MiB
    242          webm       426x240    DASH video  110k , vp9, 24fps, video only, 1.00MiB
    160          mp4        256x144    DASH video  113k , avc1.4d400c, 24fps, video only, 1.41MiB
    243          webm       640x360    DASH video  196k , vp9, 24fps, video only, 1.83MiB
    133          mp4        426x240    DASH video  247k , avc1.4d4015, 24fps, video only, 3.08MiB
    134          mp4        640x360    DASH video  263k , avc1.4d401e, 24fps, video only, 2.95MiB
    244          webm       854x480    DASH video  322k , vp9, 24fps, video only, 3.11MiB
    135          mp4        854x480    DASH video  554k , avc1.4d401e, 24fps, video only, 6.30MiB
    247          webm       1280x720   DASH video  714k , vp9, 24fps, video only, 7.48MiB
    136          mp4        1280x720   DASH video 1127k , avc1.4d401f, 24fps, video only, 12.92MiB
    248          webm       1920x1080  DASH video 1579k , vp9, 24fps, video only, 17.86MiB
    137          mp4        1920x1080  DASH video 2304k , avc1.640028, 24fps, video only, 27.09MiB
    17           3gp        176x144    small , mp4v.20.3,  mp4a.40.2@ 24k
    36           3gp        320x180    small , mp4v.20.3,  mp4a.40.2
    18           mp4        640x360    medium , avc1.42001E,  mp4a.40.2@ 96k
    43           webm       640x360    medium , vp8.0,  vorbis@128k
    22           mp4        1280x720   hd720 , avc1.64001F,  mp4a.40.2@192k (best)

grokson How (Not?) to Use Python’s List Comprehensions

You might enjoy Peter Norvig teaching you this technique which he uses to solve the Zebra Puzzle in lesson 2 of CS212:

https://classroom.udacity.com/courses/cs212/lessons/48632874...

grokson Darktable 2.2.0 released

As a quick guide to trying it for yourself (it's cross-platform, free software) have a look at these videos:

https://www.youtube.com/user/harrydurgin/videos

He has the topics and modules covered in each video cross-referenced over at his website:

http://weeklyedit.com/

You're bound to find something useful.

grokson Saving the Internet 2000TB a Day: Fixing Font Awesome’s Fonts

They're available under the OFA license. They're already shipped with Linux, eg. here:

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/package/rpms/fontaweso...

grokson LowRISC – An open-source, Linux-capable System-on-a-Chip

Done!

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2016/10/15/fedorarisc-v-is-finish...

grokson Show HN: Storing your bookmarks under revision control

Use a bookmarklet and org-protocol to trigger an org-capture template:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7464951/how-to-make-org-...

You can make the bookmarklet pass along extra info on certain pages, eg. gmail and have a capture template match it - handy for TODOs with deadlines that link back to emails.

grokson Ask HN: What text editor do you use and why is it your editor of choice?

Use emacsclient on the server to trigger emacs on your desktop to edit your mail message:

  https://andy.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/automatic-emacsclient/

grokson Org mode 9.0 released

http://www.orgzly.com

grokson Ask HN: Best linux laptop for developers

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t460p...

grokson Soylent Coffee: Nootropics, fat, carbs, protein

Stew.

grokson Bubblewrap: Unprivileged sandboxing tool

I agree, the tool is (currently) poorly documented. I would have appreciated something like this:

    bwrap --ro-bind / / id

    bwrap --ro-bind /usr /usr \
          --ro-bind /lib64 /lib64 \
          id

    bwrap --ro-bind /usr/bin/ps /usr/bin/ps \
          --ro-bind /lib64 /lib64 \
          --proc /proc \
          ps -x

    bwrap --ro-bind /usr/bin/ps /usr/bin/ps \
          --ro-bind /lib64 /lib64 \
          --proc /proc \
          --unshare-pid \
          ps -x

    bwrap --ro-bind /usr/bin/echo /usr/bin/echo \
          --ro-bind /lib64 /lib64 \
          echo "to a file outside the container" > /tmp/a-file

    bwrap --ro-bind /usr/bin/sh /usr/bin/sh \
          --ro-bind /lib64 /lib64 \
          --bind /tmp/a-file /tmp/a-file \
          sh -c 'echo "editing inside, available outside" > /tmp/a-file'

But it's never going to be easy. For example:

- The above works on my 64bit, combined /usr system, but maybe not yours. The more complicated the example, the more likely differences between systems are to show up.

- You may want to run a program with different privileges in different scenarios, so it is hard to guess what the right thing to do is in the general case.

Both bubblewrap and firejail need to be setuid. People commented on the firejail thread that it has a lot of code to be audited. Bubblewrap addresses that by stripping down to the essentials. It's going to have to compensate for that with great documentation and error messages.

grokson Firejail – security sandbox

Bubblewrap is a similar tool which carefully handles it's setuid responsibilities:

https://github.com/projectatomic/bubblewrap#related-project-...

grokson Google App Engine Silently Stopped Sending Email 5 Weeks Ago

Appengine's whack pricing says: we'd like to kick you off appengine onto GCE but that would scare away all the enterprise users from GCE. If we announce regular Moore's Law following price cuts for GCE and nothing for appengine, well hey, we can't stop you leaving. We're totally not twisting you're arm! (aside: we are)

"A commitment to Moore's Law: https://cloud.google.com/pricing/philosophy/ "

grokson Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

No problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahqKXbBVjpQ

grokson Org Mode for Emacs – Your Life in Plain Text

org-mode has the concept of attachments which you can use for pdfs, images etc.

http://orgmode.org/manual/Attachments.html

grokson 127-Year-Old U.S. Aluminum Industry Collapses Under China's Weight

A carbon fibre car performing well in a crash test:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guOq9cdFbJA

grokson Inside the Creation of the Microsoft Surface Book

That would be the HP Spectre X360:

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/HP-Spect...