I’m running Fedora 20 on an Ultra-book, meaning I am using an external (USB) CD drive. Wanting to reclaim my Mozart, I stuck it in and soon found the K3B tool for burning and ripping (as a KDE user, it was readily available); but to my horror, it was ripping at 0.5 speed. Having 20 minutes of music take over 40 minutes to rip and encode is certainly not viable, so I began looking around and tried a host of different tools.

Sometimes in the process of studying it is desirable to take the papers you are researching, which usually come as PDFs, and to convert them to an editable form. After you’re finished editing the final product could be PDF, Microsoft Word, web HTML, or something else. As this is a process that I’ve required for a number of different reasons, this tutorial covers the tools I use. Unlike other tutorials I’ve done, this process utilizes several tools beyond emacs.

I close my eyes and begin to type. In my mind, a mixed media of verbal and image information is passing through. Sometimes I am hearing the words that I am putting to the paper, other times I am seeing a page of writing which I am transcribing. The goal is two-fold: on the one hand, I am aiming for speed of production. On the other hand, I am harvesting focus.

If you work much with the Orgmode agenda you soon find that you can have a huge amount of appointments and todo tasks to deal with. You can sort these by putting tags on the, either straight from the agenda view (with :) or in the actual org file (with C-c while point is over a headline). You can then use those tags to filter and search your agenda (from agenda view, with / and \ followed by TAB).

If you work much with the Orgmode agenda you soon find that you can have a huge amount of appointments and todo tasks to deal with. You can sort these by putting tags on the, either straight from the agenda view (with :) or in the actual org file (with C-c while point is over a headline). You can then use those tags to filter and search your agenda (from agenda view, with / and \ followed by TAB).

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://.