lf, or “list files”, is a single binary file manager, inspired by the ranger file manager, but written in Go. Using this tool, you can navigate really quickly, build up a mental model of the filesystem layout and make modifications with ease. Out of the box, this is super useful on remote machines or even docker containers where you don’t have access to your normal full configuration, in my case Emacs with dired.

Last week Microsoft had to deal with some criticism, because they announced “Recall”, a new feature, available only on their new Copilot+ AI-enabled laptops, that makes regular screenshots as the computer is used and uses on-device models to generate descriptions of these images that can be stored in a database (sqlite of course) and later searched, so that a user can effectively go back in time to find almost anything. They have stated that everything happens and is stored on-device, and that the whole feature can be easily disabled.

LTTB, or Largest-Triangle-Three-Buckets, is a fantastic little algorithm that you can use for the visual downsampling of timeseries data. Let’s say your user is viewing a line chart of some timeseries data. The time-period they have selected contains 50000 points, but their display is only 4K so they have a maximum of 3840 pixels available horizontally. With LTTB, we can automatically select the 3840 or fewer points from those 50000 points that will produce a line graph which is visually very similar to what they would see if they were to try and render all 50000 points.

Introduction Just the other weekend, I had to exchange contact details using quite primitive means with a fantastic new friend after a deeply enjoyable hike up Table Mountain via the India Venster route. We could not get the flashy new iPhone-bump method to work. Although the animation triggered with each bump, no contact details were exchanged, a failure which caused the Android user at the table much mirth. That incident drove me to retrieve some old Python code I had written to try out Segno, a QRCode generator library for Python, and to test out the recently announced WASM capability of the new Marimo reactive Python notebook.

Background I was curious whether it would in theory be possible to use the docx format as a storage format for markdown documents with their associated image files, and in addition, to support the light editing of the docx file directly. In other words, the primary authoring modality would be via markdown and attachments, because this works really well for software documentation, but storage and sharing would happen via docx files, additinonally supporting the occasional direct editing of that docx without breaking the normal markdown workflow.

The blurb Below is the emacs-lisp code I’ve evolved over the years to setup reasonable font sizes on all the machines where I use Emacs. The main goal is to get the physical / apparent size of the font, in millimetres, to be more similar across all displays and display systems (Different screens across macOS, Windows with and without display scaling, WSL). This sounds like it should be easy, but setting font point size to the same number is in fact interpreted differently on various display systems.

This morning while working on my AoC submission, I wondered what the simplest procedure was for sharing a minimal setup for editing Python in Visual Studio Code using ruff for formatting, linting and import sorting, and doing all of that automatically on save. It turns out that you can just store the following extensions.json and settings.json in the .vscode sub-directory of your source directory, and all of the above will be done.