Things were going great on my Fedora 20 system. My system downloaded a new Shockwave Flash version, which is always good knowing their terrible security problems. But next thing I know my firefox is yelling at me on almost every web page, refusing to start Flash because it’s an old, insecure version. I check my versions and Firefox tells me flash is 11.2.202.438 (sheesh! Adobe is serious about version numbers) when those last digits are supposed to be .

At long last I’m producing the next of my “NOn-Programmer’s Emacs” (NOPE) editions. This post is companion to a Youtube video in the NoPE series. We’re looking at using Emacs (and in particular, Orgmode) for studying texts; in this episode of the series, we’ll be using as our example texts the LDS scriptures (official site) and some related texts. I’ve made the base files I use (org and plain-text of the scriptures) available here:

The pains of working with abstract systems are little understood by outsiders. Like my toddler. Credit: https://www.improgrammer.net/shouldnt-interrupt-programmer/

Agile programming is a buzzword-methodology now.

EDIT: I now recommend use of the excellent Disqus forum instead of built-in Drupal. It automates and crowd-sources spam control, and has a host of other features. As this frustrated user put it, I want Drupal comments to work like every other blog’s comments. Who are writing their homepage URL can write “www.example.com,” or “https://www.example.com,” and they both work. Right now, Drupal throws an error if the URL doesn’t contain “https://.

For the past year I’ve been using the free version of Mighty SMS (phone app | tablet app –sorry; Android only) to text message from my computer, actually using my phone and its phone number. The app is slick and light-weight: it does one thing and does it well. I now almost never text from my touch-screen, but get the full speed of my keyboard by logging into the web app in my browser (which I keep pinned).

A great introduction to digital media history for these kiddos. I love the reactions when they need to restart the computer to read the disk.

Emacs isn’t just for programmers; the majority of what I do in emacs is non-programming. This video shows just a few of my most common Emacs tasks. This screencast was made using RecordMyDesktop.

A powerful feature of orgmode/emacs is the ability to easily and rapidly insert footnotes1 (See section ) and then easily export them, even as html.2 (See section ) You can learn all about the commands in the official manual entry. Footnotes: ^{1 (See section )} Just like this one, using C-c C-x f ^{2 (See section )} Export as HTML and view in browser using: C-c C-e h o

I’ve been using Firefox as my primary browser for several years now, having left Chrome back in 2011. There are reasons for this beyond functionality; for example, I love Firefox as an example of true open source software and for its emphasis on security and privacy. These are places where Chrome comes in “close but not quite” and, as always, Internet Explorer is way, way off the mark. But I’ve also come across a number of add-ons that have made my Firefox use more powerful and comfortable.