Learning Emacs Part 1

Emacs, if you’re unfamiliar, is a text editor that has been around since the 1970s. It was originally designed for editing macros in early computer systems. The most popular version, and the one that dominates the space today is GNU Emacs which was developed by Richard Stallman somewhere around 1976. I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of its history but knowing that it has been around for nearly 50 years and remains a very popular editor, particularly among developers and others, like me, who are interested in exploring different technologies and appreciate the extensibility and utility of the program gives you a sense of why you might want to consider it.

This page is aimed at addressing issues/learning about installing and troubleshooting OpenBSD on the Lenovo X250. These changes may work with other devices, but I cannot confirm that!

• Toggling the Touchpad to avoid Palm Rejection Issues

Toggling the Touchpad in OpenBSD on Lenovo X250 to Address Palm Rejection Issues.

So, one of the challenges I encountered with OpenBSD is that the touchpad does a really bad job of rejecting motion from my palm. While writing in Emacs I’d often find my mouse jumping around and my writing not where I expected it to be.

After some digging around I found a solution:

How to setup OpenBSD in i3 to toggle touchpad

Create a file in ~/home/bin/ called “toggle-touchpad.sh”

So, I began reading Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, creator of Nesslabs.com and was intrigued by the idea of setting short-term goals with very specific actions and deadlines. Her original experiment was to write 100 articles in 100 working days. In the book she also discussed Andrew Kallaway’s 100 Days of Code challenge in which he publicly committed to coding for at least one hour a day for 100 days. The whole concept of making that kind of public commitment, together with clearly defined actions.

Moving from Exchange to Zoho Mail

Somewhere back around 2011 or 2012 I moved from my ISP’s email service to Microsoft Office 365 Business plan that offered access to MS Exchange server. I had previously toyed with using Gmail’s services with my own domain name but didn’t find that it met my specific needs. Too, I really didn’t have a great love for Gmail.

My motivation for moving, as I recall now more than a dozen years later, is that I was starting my doctoral studies and needed to be able to coordinate more easily with classmates, access calendars and documents across multiple platforms, and generally have better control over my workflows. I was already using Microsoft Office for my word processing and spreadsheet needs, and was looking for an integrated solution that would allow me to plan and execute my work more easily. After playing around with several solutions I finally settled on Office 365.