I wanted to explore some of the new features in Emacs 29 (in particular Eglot). The version of Emacs that ships with my version of Linux Mint is Emacs 27, so I decided to build Emacs 29 from scratch.
This turned out to be absolutely painless; but installing the new version seamlessly into the existing environment did cause some hang-ups.
As it turns out, Emacs actually allows for different cursor shapes. We can use this feature to change the cursor based on the current minor mode.
A little while ago, I read (and quite enjoyed) “Learning eBPF” by Liz Rice. “Linux Observability with BPF” David Calavera and Lorenzo Fontana is another, slightly earlier, book on the BPF framework, also published by O’Reilly.
The extended Berkeley Packet Filter, or eBPF for short, is a plugin architecture for the Linux kernel. Using eBPF, it is possible to load (short) programs into the kernel at runtime, and have them be executed by the kernel. As the name suggests, the technology started out as a method to build custom filters for network packets, but it has since been extended and become much more general.
A tool to display directory entries, sorted by size, together with their cumulative contribution to the total.
After seeing positive references to it on Linux Weekly News and elsewhere, I bought a copy of “Mastering Emacs” by Mickey Petersen.
What methods are there to connect an external (USB) drive or memory stick to a Linux box most conveniently?
They use a “real database”. They use “nice object-oriented libraries”. They use “nice C++ abstractions”. And quite frankly, as a result of all these design decisions that sound so appealing to some CS people, the end result is a horrible and unmaintainable mess.
Building open-source software from source is not necessarily hard: after
all, typing make is fairly easy. But dealing with the tools and
dependencies can be tedious, in particular, if you don’t use them
all the time.
In this post, I want to describe how to use Docker containers as
convenient, clean-room build environments.
QR codes are a two-dimensional equivalent of barcodes: a graphical encoding of information, which in practice means a string of about 4000 alpha-numeric characters (upper-case only) or a little less than 3000 arbitrary bytes.
So, how then are QR codes able to perform magic, such as automatically opening web pages, or sending text messages, or even dealing bitcoin? The answer is: they can’t.
Let’s try to understand what’s going on.