Hackaday Newsletter 0x5B

It's maybe my oldest file, and I don't really understand it. [HACKADAY]( Singapore Branches Out Into Internet of Trees [Read Article Now»]( Fossil Files: My .Emacs By [Elliot Williams]( Last week, I wrote about cargo culting in a much more general context, so this week I’m going to come clean. The file that had me thinking about the topic was the worst case you’ve probably ever seen: I have a .emacs file kicking around that I haven’t really understood since I copied it from someone else – probably Ben Scarlet whose name is enshrined therein – in the computer lab in 1994! Yes, my .emacs file is nearly 30, and I still don’t really understand it, not exactly. Now in my defence, I switched up to vim as my main editor a few years ago, but this one file has seen duty on Pentiums running pre-1.0 versions of Linux, on IBM RS/6000 machines in the aforementioned computer lab, and on a series of laptops and desktops that I’ve owned over the years. It got me through undergrad, grad school, and a decade of work. It has served me well. And if I fired up emacs right now, it would still be here. For those of you out there who don’t use emacs, the .emacs file is a configuration file. It says how to interpret different files based on their extensions, defines some special key combos, and perhaps most importantly, defines how code syntax highlighting works. It’s basically all of the idiosyncratic look-and-feel stuff in emacs, and it’s what makes my emacs mine. But I don’t understand it. Why? Because it’s written in LISP, for GNU’s sake, and because it references all manner of cryptic internal variables that emacs uses under the hood. I’m absolutely not saying that I haven’t tweaked some of the colors around, or monkey-patched something in here or there, but the extent is always limited to whatever I can get away with, without having to really learn LISP. This ancient fossil of a file is testament to two things. The emacs codebase has been stable enough that it still works after all this time, but also that emacs is so damn complicated and written in an obscure enough language that I have never put the time in to really grok it – the barriers are too high and the payoff for the effort too low. I have no doubt that I could figure it out for real, but I just haven’t. So I just schlep this file around, from computer to computer, without understanding it and without particularly wanting to. Except now that I write this. Damnit. From the Blog --------------------------------------------------------------- [Gift Idea from 1969: A Kitchen Computer]( By [Al Williams]( Recipes were supposed to be the killer app that would bring computers into the home. [Read more »]( [USB-C: Introduction For Hackers]( By [Arya Voronova]( Join Arya for a new series looking at the one connector to rule them all. [Read more »]( [Love AI, but Don’t Love It Too Much]( By [Jenny List]( Will AI kill the search engine by swamping out the signal with noise? Jenny says maybe. [Read more »]( [Hackaday Podcast]( [Hackaday Podcast 196: Flexing Hard PCBs, Dangers of White Filament, and the Jetsons’ Kitchen Computer]( By [Hackaday Editors]( What happened last week on Hackaday? The Podcast will get you up to speed. [Read more »]( If You Missed It --------------------------------------------------------------- [Epic Guide to Bare-Metal STM32 Programming]( [Radial Vector Reducer Rotates At Really Relaxed Velocity]( [Rotary Dial Number Pad is the Perfect Prank for Retro-Phone Enthusiast]( [Restarting The Grid When The Grid Is Off The Grid]( [Merry Christmas! Rip and Tear!]( [A Tiny RISC-V Emulator Runs Linux With No MMU. And Yes, It Runs DOOM!]( [Hackaday]( NEVER MISS A HACK [Share]( [Share]( [Share]( [Terms of Use]( [Privacy Policy]( [Hackaday.io]( [Hackaday.com]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update preferences]( Hackaday.com · 61 S Fair Oaks Ave Ste 200 · Pasadena, CA 91105-2270 · USA