Category: Article

Moshi's PalmGuard for the Macbook Pro is perfect

Having grown quite accustomed to ThinkPads, it has been a very long time since
I have worried about the palm rest of a laptop. All of that changed when the
Macbook came into my life. My biggest concern was the resale value of the
device, and I found thta the simplest possible solution what was to just take off my
watch and use my phone to keep time instead. In retrospect, that was kind of
stupid, so I bought one of Mochi’s palm rest protectors 1,
and it has far exceeded every expectation that I had of it.

My expectations:

  • Color matched, doesn’t make the device look like a two-tone paint job
  • Protects the device, doesn’t allow scratches
  • Make it easy and comfortable to wear a watch, thin and tidy
  • Easy to apply, no hair pulling to line things up
  • Touch pad works perfectly

All of those expectations were exceeded.

The color looks just fine to me. Sure it is a tad off, but what matters is that
the device is protected for resale. The pad protects the device flat out. My
watch sits just fine on it, it is thick enough to pad the watch and thin enough
barely to be noticeable. It was shockingly delightful to apply given the often
frustrating nature of such endeavors. The touch pad works perfectly with the
pad on top. The mouse, expose, window switching, and everything just works.
This was a shock given how many ways they could have screwed up here. Instead,
it just works. Very cool.

After installation I used a credit card to work out a few bubbles and and life
went on. For anyone worried that this might not work well for their machine,
I installed it on a 15″ Macbook Pro, and the product is for sale on Apple’s
website which is enough of an explicit endorsement for me.

All in all this has been an amazingly positive user experience and the product
has worked really, really well.

Some good projects or courses of study for R

Personal approach for collecting Emacs usage statistics advice?

Lately I’ve been curious whether or not my actual Emacs keymapping usage actually reflects how I think I use it. What I mean is that I have a goal of mapping frequently used operations to easily-accessible keybindings on the keyboard. What I plan to do is to record my usage so that I can study it to find mapping decisions that I got right, and wrong, and also identify things that I use that I should be mapping closer to home.
The simplest approach would be to use a keylogger, or advice inside of Emacs.
What I am curious about is your approach if you had done, or would do, something like this, and your thoughts an ideas.
In my case I lay out my mappings for how far away from home they are, and that has worked well so far, but I would like some numbers to back up that claim though it is not too serious depending upon how you look at it.
Cross posted from help-gnu-emacs

The difference between org-ref and org-bibtex

In case you were wondering, here is an answer:

Some features could be merged, but there is an important difference in that org-ref uses bibtex as the backend database, and reftex for searching, and org-bibtex uses org-mode headings as the backend database, and tag/property searches (I think). It is like the difference between org-contacts and bbdb. They both serve similar needs, but with different data sources, and different ways to think about it.

Both approaches are quite nice. Sometimes it seems easier to be able to share the original, not exported, database with folks even though technically it makes no difference what is the system or origin for that data!

Line snippet helper for posting code

On the org list there are a few ways that people post code indicate the start and end of that code. This is my version that might work in any mode:

(defun gcr/insert-noticeable-snip-comment-line ()
  "Insert a noticeable snip comment line (NSCL)."
  (interactive)
  (if (not (bolp))
      (message "I may only insert a NSCL at the beginning of a line.")
    (let ((ncl (make-string 70 ?✂)))
      (newline)
      (previous-line)
      (insert ncl)
      (comment-or-uncomment-region (line-beginning-position) (line-end-position)))))

ADDENDUM: 2014-06-22T10:18:59-0500: Added newline first

Drop of water

A drop of water struggles so hard to return to the ocean. The ocean welcomes it
back with open arms. That is not the time for the ocean, with all of its magnitude
and unlimited beauty and kindness, to remind the drop that it came from the ocean,
left up into the atmosphere, and to came the Earth to serve it, and it is natural for it to
eventually come home, and that the ocean was waiting the whole time.