This post originally appeared at Org Mode Exocortex, my Org mode-focused blog, on April 30, 2020.

:ID: b3c6cee0-567e-4324-9685-f6fd9959d402

Introduction

Inspired by Stéfan’s post explaining how to voice capture TODOs using Google Assistant on Android, I decided to find out how one would go about hooking up Siri dictation on iOS to Org mode.

It turns out that Siri Shortcuts is a pretty amazing tool that can be used for all kinds of automation on your iPhone or iPad.

Warning on 2021-06-21: Don’t try this work-around

With a pandoc 2.5 installation on Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS I am not able to get this hack working anymore.

My suggestion is to look into some of the better solutions that were later implemented in ox-hugo.

Introduction

I have written before explaining how you can use org-ref to insert citations into your org mode documents, and then have them export perfectly into PDF documents via LaTeX.

TL;DR: Install my WSL-specific xdg-open replacement by following the instructions on the xdg-open-wsl github page.

Convert a Python script to a Python package with Poetry.

In my previous vxlabs post, I explained how to use Emacs lisp advising to fix buggy behaviour when opening Windows files from Emacs running on WSL.

In that post I mentioned my home-grown xdg-open replacement.

As I was writing that bit, I wondered how long it would take for the first astute reader to wonder about the mentioned script.

Background.

On Windows, I run Emacs on WSL 1 whilst displaying to Windows via the X410 X-Server.

This is currently the best compromise if one wants to interoperate with the NTFS side, at least until the WSL 2 developers manage to fix up its current cross-OS IO performance issues.

As part of this setup, I have written a small xdg-open replacement in Python which does path translation. This enables me to open any links from Emacs, running on WSL 1, using the relevant Windows file handler, no matter whether the file finds itself on the Windows or the WSL side of the world.

Previously I wrote how to get the WlzIIPSrv large image server running on webfaction, using lighttpd.

Fast-forward 2.5 years, and I was busy porting the whole site (again), this time from webfaction (acquired by godaddy, who are planning to kill the great webfaction product), along with all of my other websites (including this one that you’re reading), to a fast, self-managed Hetzner VPS in Nuremberg.

I needed to get that exact same WlzIIPSrv large image slice server fastcgi running, but this time behind nginx and preferably without lighttpd.

Background

I recently joined the Windows Insider Program, on the slow ring, to be able to test a development version of the soon-to-be-released Windows Subsystem for Linux, version 2, henceforth WSL 2.

Microsoft is doing fantastic work integrating Linux with their Windows operating system.

I find it personally quite useful being able to do native Linux development on the Windows partition of my ThinkPad, whilst still having access to all of the native Windows applications that I sometimes need to use.

TL;DR.

In this post, I propose bending the format=flowed RFC by allowing lines up to the SMTP limit of 998 characters, in order to improve the plaintext reading experience for users of non-compliant email clients and services, such as GMail, FastMail, Outlook and others.

Background.

The format=flowed plaintext email convention described in RFC3676 is an elegant method whereby plaintext emails can be prepared in such a way so that they are wrapped correctly on older email clients, but they can also be reflowed by modern clients supporting that part of the standard.