Author: grant

How may one be sure that the OSX computer is actually asleep?

OSX provides many pleasant energy saving features. It is so efficient that it is difficult to know whether or not the machine is turned off (or sleeping) or just the screen is turned off. Trying to determine a method to answer that question I found many approaches that relied too much upon poorly understood features and nothing as clear as “there is a little light turned on” simply because there is no light and no clear answer assumedly. Probably that is by design. Eventually I suppose that the logical end is to learn about how the system level flags that prevent sleep (compiled or not) interact with the energy saving mechanism.

Whitespace

Most modern programming languages do not consider white space characters (spaces, tabs and newlines) syntax, ignoring them, as if they weren’t there. We consider this to be a gross injustice to these perfectly friendly members of the character set. Should they be ignored, just because they are invisible? Whitespace is a language that seeks to redress the balance. Any non whitespace characters are ignored; only spaces, tabs and newlines are considered syntax.

Whitespace must be learned.

God Mode — no more RSI

Lot of posts recently about the desire to reduce RSI from too much keyboard use in Emacs. Although I didn’t look up any studies or evidence of this, the idea of hacking how to handle keybindings in Emacs is always interesting.
God mode is one way to “simplify” things.
Basically you go in and out of the mode, and when in it, single key strokes are automatically prefaced with a control, and meta commands are prefaced with a g instead.