[Thu Sep 13 11:15:11 CDT 2018]
A few short
notes on how to configure the mutt email client to work with GMail, by Kevin
McCarthy. I had to check them out a few minutes ago in order to solve a
problem with my configuration where mutt was not saving the deleted messages
to the correct folder. The key is the following setting:
set trash="imaps://imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Trash"
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[Mon Sep 10 09:17:26 CDT 2018]
The webzine Quartz publishes an interesting article titled Forget easy-to-use design. Choose something hard instead, signed by Nikhil Sonnad that makes a good case for using "difficult" text editors, such as
vim or Emacs:
The new cult of simple software is making us less productive. Simple tools
get in the way of our thinking by making assumptions about what we want to do,
and by putting the ease of getting going ahead of optimizing productivity. By
contrast, using a tool like Vim makes me more expressive. It reduces the
friction between what’s in my head and what I can make happen on the computer.
I can more easily and quickly try out several variations of what I’m writing.
It is also incredibly flexible. If I don’t like the way Vim does something, I
can change or add features using packages other people have created, or spend a
bit of time learning how to make my own. That’s not as hard as it seems:
Just watch this talk by Jay Dixit, a science writer with no programming
experience, who customized Vim’s excellent rival, Emacs, to adhere to his
personal writing workflow and style.
It is time to embrace the difficult tool. No more accepting Excel when
learning R or Python would let us do better work; no more out-of-the-box
flashcards instead of customized software like Anki. Let’s stop expecting
software to do everything for us, and put our minds to work.
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[Tue Sep 4 10:13:20 CDT 2018]
A few days ago, Ars Technica published an article titled $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft that is
well worth reading. Talking about the latest wave of Chromebooks, the author points out that they
don't appear to be aimed at the low-end education market anymore:
But these $600 machines aren't aimed at those same students. Lenovo reps
told us that its new Chromebook was developed because the company was seeing
demand for Chromebooks from users with a bit more disposable income. For
example, new college students that had used Chrome OS at high school and
families who wanted the robustness Chrome OS offers are looking for machines
that are more attractive, use better materials, and are a bit faster and more
powerful. The $600 machines fit that role.
And that's why Microsoft should be concerned. This demand shows a few things.
Perhaps most significantly of all, it shows that Chrome OS's mix of Web
applications, possibly extended with Android applications, is good enough for a
growing slice of home and education users. Windows still has the application
advantage overall, but the relevance of these applications is diminishing as
Web applications continue to improve. A browser and the Web are sufficient to
handle the needs of a great many users. No Windows necessary, not even to run
the browser.
To be fair,
this is an old dream of all Web fans out there. As a matter of
fact, it's the same idea the Netscape's brains had back in the 1990s. If anything, they were a bit
ahead of their times. However, by now it definitely looks as if we have
reached the point where web technologies are mature enough to allow something
like this to happen.
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