Posts

webxdc more interesting than web3

webxdc: at least 200 times more interesting than Web3 :) The original is a github blob1, so I’m reproducing it here for longevity sake. The original is by Holger Krekel2. Full Text: webxdc: at least 200 times more interesting than Web3 :) webxdc combines secure chat-messaging and web tech to provide fertile ground for a decentralized secure web app eco-system without servers, coins or chains. How webxdc works webxdc apps use existing chat groups (instead of web servers) to communicate with each other, with roughly this initial technical work flow:

Emacs Personal Development Environment: accessing my notes

Intro Due to the nature of my work, I operate in a variety of environments, databases, and languages. Emacs is very good for this. As an example of this, I just found myself needing to verify if an update had worked on the PostGres database of a remote server. First I logged in to the server with better-shell-remote-open1, and then I sudoed and changed to the postgres user, then I quickly fired up my bookmarked myPostgres.

customize sudo prompt

Intro I am writing a wrapper that executes sudo anyconnect. I am then asked for a sudo password, then asked for the password that goes with my anycnonnect destination. Doing this repeatedly, especially where it might not ask the sudo password again because you are already logged in to SUDO for this session, it can be confusing which password it really wants. The answer1 can be installed in your .bashrc:

Re-Writing a GlobalProtect OpenConnect VPN Connect script in Babashka

** Edit 2023.001.17: fixed syntax errors CLI command in /usr/bin and username > user This is an update of a previous Babashka1 project2, changed because my organization has switched to a Palo Alto GlobalProtect VPN instead of our former Cisco one. Originally this posed a major problem for OpenConnect, which had troubles with GlobalProtect, but with wersion 9+ of OpenConnect it works smoothly (as long as your provider doesn’t require SAML authentication, which is apparently still buggy in OpenConnect 9).

Change Firefox default zoom level

Intro I use several three-monitor setups and one of the setups has a large TV-size screen as the monitor. I typically put my browser instances over there and need to shrink them to a more zoomed-out level to make websites usable at that size. The answer was to change the layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in the about:config1. I changed mine to 0.8, which was equal to about the 80% zoom level which works for me.

dragon drag-on with emacs dired

Dragon drag-and-drop The “dragon"1 application (think drag-on) is super handy for #emacs #exwm and probably was made for tiling window managers like iw3m. Go from dired to, eg, Google Drive drag-and-drop. . Footnotes 1 Dragon is available from https://github.com/mwh/dragon

Clojure Libraries in ODH

Intro The following is a copy of a blog post for our organization, originally posted at https://odh.byu.edu/blog/clojure-libraries-in-odh My work with The Office of Digital Humanities is as a senior web developer. My teams and I build applications in the Clojure programming language1 to serve the college of Humanities and the Office of Digital Humanities, and utility libraries that serve the university and the broader developer community. Here are a few of our heavily used utility libraries, which have been used internally for years.

finding and changing a status-bar face

Problem: unreadable font in the mode-line Inquired on Reddit1 I use Bookmarks+, a superb package. But for some reason the status message face when I want to delete a bookmark is night unreadable, and although I can customize all the faces that appear in my actual bookmark list, I cannot figure out how to change that one. So, in principle, how do I find out what face is causing the ugliness when it’s in my status bar (so I can’t do the usual inspecting)?

viewing epub in emacs

Intro I finally arranged my employer to purchase Mastering Emacs1, which provided it in pdf and epub. PDF2 has long since been my standard thanks to being able to view it nicely on all my devices, but I thought I would give epub a try, too. It’s major feature sounds like both emacs-window text resizing, and page memory so it keeps track of where you’ve read. It turns out that the lauded epub mode has some extra steps with the installation.