Planetemacs on Janusworx

Emacs Can Transparently Encrypt and Decrypt File With Gpg

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 12:43:56 +0530

I’ve been struggling to get org-caldav working on the desktop.
Nothing to do with the program itself. It’s excellent, fairly intuitive and really well documented. There just seems to be some gremlin in the works, that does not let the darned calendar see my org files.¹ Will keep at it.

What this note is for however, was the pleasant realisation that Emacs can transparently work with gpg encrypted files.²
I wanted to keep my calendar user/password credentials in a file, because the to and fro between my Baikal caldav server was generating too many requests for my password.
The org-caldav README suggested that I save it all in an .authinfo file, like so.

machine www.google.com:443 port https login username password secret

which for me translated as

machine my-caldav-server:443 port https login <my-username> password <my-password>

And the connection worked! Without me putting my password in every two seconds.

I was still a bit leery about putting my password into a plaintext file, so I looked it up and it told me to specifically use an authinfo.gpg not the plaintext version. The magic still didn’t strike me, until I tried to save the file. Emacs called up my gpg agent, which popped up a box asking me to unlock my key, and then Emacs went ahead and encrypted my file. Just like that! I tried opening it and the same thing happened in reverse. No mussing around with the command line.

If I save a file with a .gpg extension, Emacs will automatically encrypt it!
If you want to learn more, the great Mickey Petersen knows all!³

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Probably because I’m running Baikal ↩︎
via the EasyPG package ↩︎
And ofcourse, I had to find this lovely article, after all my stumbling about! ↩︎

Org Mode Subtree Expansion With the Mouse

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 08:04:19 +0530

When I wrote about, ticking off checkboxes in Org Mode, I’d linked to line 101 of org-mouse.el. While I’d read the main summary, I somehow missed line 30 …

;; * subtree expansion/collapse (org-cycle) with the left mouse button

Which I accidentally triggered today …

After an (accidental) click opens up to …

Org Mode continues to delight! Hurrah!

What I Learned Today (13th of February, 2023)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 19:24:35 +0530

Nothing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing!
I didn’t feel well today. So I went to bed.

Did log my usual weekly, books and fitness entries though.¹

Urdu
#

Did the “ain” / “gain” group.
Had fun, trying to pronounce the fricative gh (/ɣ/) sound.

Emacs
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Just a little note of gratitude to the community over at Emacslife Me, thinking out aloud in the last part of this section, led to several folks emailing me with kind and encouraging words.
- Jon Snader mentioning yours truly on Irreal
  It gives me a slight thrill everytime, he boosts one of my posts (as I’m sure all the others do too!)
- M— generously shared a link to the Bernt Hansen’s awesome Orgmode post as well as reassuring me, they did the same thing as I :)
- D— had this to say, Lean in on it and be comfortable “borrowing code”. Many of us do it. As long as you understand it, it should be fine. […] The gains obtained from not having to cold-start from zero are worth considering.
Thank you all very much. Makes me happy when I realise, I’m not shouting into the void and that I’m a part of a warm, welcoming group of kinfolk.

What? You don’t follow me on the fediverse? You totally should! ↩︎

What I Learned Today (11th of February, 2023)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 14:42:56 +0530

Rest day! Not doing much!

Emacs
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It works! Yesterday’s little hack, to clock in and out when I change state works well! It doesn’t seem to have broken anything.
Also I added a WORKING state, and tagged my function to that. The clock in and out happen when I switch in an out of the WORKING state. Because I want my parent task to show IN_PROGRESS and the current subtask to be what I am working on. Like so …

** IN_PROGRESS Emacs
*** WORKING Learn about Org
*** TODO Write about what you learnt

Here’s an image of an actual task …

Except for one more thing.¹
When I switch another task to WORKING, it does clock me out of the old task, but it leaves the TODO state at WORKING. I want the old task to switch to WAITING. I’ll look at doing this as soon as I get some breathing time.

Devops
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Spoke to a friend about some how and what and why for close to an hour
Helped me clear my mind lots!

Urdu
#

Did “toey” and “zoey”
Did I mention three letters for the same S sound yesterday?
Ha! Z has four! Zaal, Ze, Zuaad & Zoey
Also tutor’s note:

the word “zan” (ज़न) when written with ‘zoey’ means “presumption” whereas, the same word, when written with a ‘ze’ instead, means “woman”.

Which means? Lots of practice and reading ahead :)
Also coming from the madness that is English, I keep telling myself, this is not so bad 😂
Like Lizzo doing crack.

Physical Fitness
#

Rest day!

Thoughts
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The meta need / theme of learning and working, as I am doing now, is that I need to work to a time budget
- Here’s the problem, try and solve it in an hour (or whatever time I budget)
I need to have no shame if I cannot get it done
I need to ask for help / look up solutions faster
I also need to budget the time to understand the solutions.
- If I cannot fix it one day and the solution is taking time to “get”, be ok with spending time the next day
It’s just me. There is no one else. There is no need to pressure myself more than necessary.
Work to the spec. Generalising (at least for now) is taboo. Now, I understand what my friends tell me about me perfectionism. I keep spending way too long about what if this? and what if that? I need to get something working first. Refine / expand / refactor it later
Get better at logging times
Get better at taking breaks between tasks
Writing these logs has helped gain insight and understanding. I need to keep at it. It’ll help with the “what now? what next?” questions

Getting greedy, aren’t I? :) ↩︎

What I Learned Today (10th of February, 2023)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 19:53:47 +0530

Decided to play hooky today, because I got up reallly late and then I got stuff at home to do.

Emacs
#

Since I was playing hooky with my time and attention anyway, I decided to see, if I could tackle this little thing, I wanted to happen with my Org Mode.
Everytime I move my TODO status for a task to IN_PROGRESS, I want Org to automatically clock in for me. And everytime I move out of the IN_PROGRESS state, I wanted it to clock out. This is because I want a one step process. I don’t want to change state and then clock in too. And I want it this way, because changing states and telling my program, that I’m going to work on this, here, task now is more natural to me, than clocking in and out.
A whole day of reading and searching later, I stumbled across this gem on the Emacs StackExchange site which did exactly what I was looking to do.
I stole it, twiddled a bit with the variable and function names and added it to the file that handles my Org config. This is it, in its entirety

(add-hook 'org-after-todo-state-change-hook
 'mjb/org-clock-todo-change)

(defun mjb/org-clock-todo-change ()
 (if (string= org-state "IN_PROGRESS")
 (org-clock-in)
 (org-clock-out-if-current)))

And this works! For now. If something comes up, I’ll figure it out.
Which brings me to the figuring out part. Doing this today has left me conflicted. In the old life, this is exactly how I’d do it. But ever since I’ve been learning to write code, I feel like this is something I should be able to do. But there’s only so much life and so much I want. I want the results today, and learning and writing Lisp is not going to happen in a jiffy. Right now my priorities are Devops related tasks. So I’ve just taken the pragmatic way out for now, and used code I found.

Urdu
#

Learnt about the “suaad” group.
And also learnt that Urdu is just as crazy as English.
There are three, count ’em, three ways of making the S sound and no particular rhyme or reason to them, save history :)
“Proficiency in using the correct letter in a word can only come with practice”, according to the site 😂
It’s still much better than English, I think :)

Physical Fitness
#

Had a sit down with my trainer and explained what I wanted.
He got it. I also understood his approach and we worked out a happy medium
Today’s session was much better.
I can now say, after these days, that I’ve gotten over those early gym aches.
It still hurts, but I no longer drag my feet, and crawl home like a zombie.

Planetemacs on Janusworx

Emacs Can Transparently Encrypt and Decrypt File With Gpg

Org Mode Subtree Expansion With the Mouse

What I Learned Today (13th of February, 2023)

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What I Learned Today (11th of February, 2023)

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What I Learned Today (10th of February, 2023)

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Physical Fitness #

Urdu
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Emacs
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Emacs
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Devops
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Urdu
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Physical Fitness
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Emacs
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Urdu
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Physical Fitness
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