Personal Productivity

Gmail has its own ideas how to do things. Here are two small tricks that make it easier to use email with a local email client set-up.

I recently got interested in singular perturbation theory , and to get help with the algebra, I turned to SymPy. I had tried to use Mathematica in graduate school in the early 90s, but the experience had been sufficiently frustrating that I had steered clear of computer algebra systems since.

SymPy presents itself as a “friendly”, less intimidating alternative, with a more familiar and conventional language and operating model.

I am currently working (again) on a larger writing project in Latex. Doing so made me revisit the Latex ecosystem, and I discovered several useful packages that I had not known before.

I have never seen a software project in which the limiting factor was the speed with which programmers could type.

The default highlighting of the Emacs “region” (the part of a buffer between “point” and “mark” — selected text, if any, in other words) is, out of the box, barely visible, at least against a light background. An attempt to customize it runs into an interesting problem when used in a text- or terminal-based environment, rather than a GUI.

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 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?