Blog - Thoughts, Insights

Here you find news about our activities, events in which we participate, and things we find interesting around the web, and the industry.

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Polyglot Snippets With Tempel

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Text snippets, or templates as some call them, are a big boost in productivity, since they save us from typing the very same thing time again. In my previous post on tempel I already showed you my basic setup for this.

Now what if you're like me, and converse with folks in different languages? Well, you would simply define snippets whose expansion text is in the desired language. While this looks promising at first, there may soon be "overlaps" in that the names of weekdays, or months often start with the same, or very similar sequences of letters in the various languages. If you type "jan", for instance, would you want it expanded to "January" (English), or to "janvier" (French)?

You could start diddling with "jan-E", and "jan-F", but here's a more elegant, and more automatic solution.

Bye Bye to Wordpress

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When I developed my first website, I wrote HTML in Emacs. When I first heard of WordPress, I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread because it allowed me to create websites without managing individual HTML and CSS files. Over time, my enthusiasm for WordPress has eroded quite a bit, though. It felt more and more like building a fish tank and trying to not get your hands wet. I spent more time figuring out all the hidden editing features, than writing content. Editing websites in a browser perhaps is not the most compelling concept ever. Why run a huge pile of PHP code, and as SQL database, when my site is neither a web-shop, nor a major news outlet?

Leaving Yasnippet and Going to the Tempel 🏛️

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When it comes to productivity enhancements, templates (or text snippets as some call them) are a very effective, and efficient solution. Type less, say more, and with fewer typos. This is the story why I decided to abandon the much famed yasnippet package for Emacs, to replace it with the tempel package, and how I went about the migration.

Our New Email Setup

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In the previous post of this little email series, I have been bragging about configurability, and the associated learning curve. A prime example are Emacs and its Org mode, both of which I use. At the outset, when I start using a new tool, I am tempted to search the Interwebs for insight how power users make use of it. If you search for Emacs and Org mode setups, you will be swamped.

Why We Need to Rethink Email, and How

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We all know, email can be a pain. And – let’s be honest – more often than not, it is a pain; big time. I am not talking about the sheer volume, although that would warrant a series of posts of its own. The aspect I’d like to focus on in this post, is how email clients have grown convoluted over time, how this has shaped our mental model of email, and how it is hampering our productivity.

ComposeIT End-of-Life Announcement

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We haven’t been updating our ComposeIT plugin for the mail app that ships with macOS for a while now. Consequently, if you had upgraded to a recent version of macOS, you were unfortunately no longer able to use it. This is due to two reasons. First, Apple have again drastically changed the interface between their mail app and its plugins. Updating ComposeIT to the new interface would have implied substantial work.

The Efail Scam: What You Should Do as a User of Apple's Mail.app

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You have probably heard of the recent hype about OpenPGP/GnuPG/etc. and S/MIME having been compromised. Actually, that’s not true. What has been discovered, is that the ways that many email apps make use of OpenPGP and S/MIME are vulnerable to exploits. Make no mistake: the OpenPGP and S/MIME encryption schemes and tools themselves are still safe to use. It’s the mail clients that are to blame. Here is what you can do to minimise your attack surface as a user of Apple’s Mail.

We're Speaking at EBU Forecast 2017

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We are excited to announce that Alexander Adolf will be speaking at the EBU Forecast 2017 conference. His talk will explain what the incentives for cable operators are to look at IP distribution, and what still keeps them away from it. Check out the conference programme, and be sure to register in case you haven’t just yet. It’s a worthwhile invest if you are in the broadcast industry and are interested in the latest technology trends and developments.