Viewing profile — TomDavey

> In essence give a sub-3% user base a disproportionate amount of attention. Some comments in this thread are arguing that many less economically developed countries provide poorer…

Emacs includes a built-in mode named Org. Org-mode offers both hierarchy and tags. Org does many things, but it's especially accomplished at notetaking. Elisp authors have written …

Tut-tut, my good sir, condescension is the raison d'être of The New Yorker.

Or, more starkly: "Reading a Shakespeare play is like listening to Beethoven by reading the score."

Thanks for recalling the earlier discussion. It includes testimonials to Emacs org-mode, and to the Zettelkasten package built atop org-mode, org-roam. Org-mode can't be beat, IMO,…

That XKCD is hilarious! I've never seen it before: My control key is hard to reach, so I hold spacebar instead, and I configured Emacs to interpret a rapid temperature rise as "Con…

Excellent example! This sentence contains no actor at all, unless the mistakes made themselves.

Preferring the active voice to the passive voice (to use the terms from formal grammar) whenever feasible is the universal recommendation of writing instruction in English, e.g. by…

I was careful to say "middle-period Beethoven." Beethoven's stylistic evolution over the course of his life truly astonishes. In his late period, e.g., the Grosse Fugue, one can he…

No: music ushered in the Romantic age, earlier than Goethe and Schiller in literature. The musical style, a decisive break from the High Baroque, was initially called "Sturm und Dr…

Indeed. My iPhone 6s (lovely big screen) has worked perfectly since 2015. I'm disappointed that IOS 16 won't be available for it, but I really can't complain after continuous, impe…

I hugely dislike the POS terminal for exactly this reason: "The waiter brings the POS terminal and you pay at the table." The experience I dislike goes like this: The server gives …

Yes, Directory Opus is outstanding. I'm an Emacs fanboy to an intense degree, but I've never bothered to learn Dired. Directory Opus, although mouse-driven, is simply too powerful.…

> anticipates 538 and all the other media on elections that ultimately disenfranchise voters. Serious question: how does "media on elections" disenfranchise voters? I would have th…

Also on Firefox. It appears that I'm not as privacy/security conscious as are most in this thread, but I heartily second HTTPS Everywhere. However, the single Firefox extension tha…

It's on my list. The reviews have indeed been rapturous. Before "Dawn of Everything" (his final book) was published this year, Graeber (an anthropologist with a specialty in econom…

Emacs Calc. Mind blowing in features and power. As for the UI . . . well, it's Emacs.

You just described the thesis of one of the wisest books I've ever read, Albert O. Hirschman's 1970 classic "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit%2C_Voice%…

+1 for Emacs autosave. Note that an autosave file is not the original file you were working on but a copy saved at the interval you specify. The original file is left untouched unt…

Here's a technique for revising and improving prose that has no analog in programming: reading the text aloud to yourself. This is the best way to fix a first draft, of short texts…

For me, "Fellini Satyricon" is his most remarkable film, even if not his greatest and certainly not his most popular. No film about the Roman world has conveyed so graphically what…

A second thumbs-up on BotaBox. I drink its cabernet sauvignon and honestly can't taste the difference from ordinary bottled red, although I've never trained my palate in any seriou…

I live in an apartment building in a quite noisy locale, Manhattan in New York City. I solved the problem with pliable silicone "putty" earplugs. They provide the closest to dead s…

Yes it is, or even if you're just a classical music fan who likes to listen while following along with the score. I contribute $2 USD a month to Petrucci/IMSLP for the same reason …

A single Org file holds my wiki. Yes, it's big, but Org's features make it easily manageable. Org has fine hyperlinking, and equally fine searching -- including searches on headlin…