Motivation A key task at the moment is individual 1-to-1s/catch-ups. These come around quick, and I often don’t have a huge amount of time to deal set them up. I have stared to tag things in Emacs with peoples name so that I can run queries against my agenda and pull out all tasks that I’ve tagged for someone - a great way to get info to the right people....
Motivation I am doing lots or recruitment at the moment - some weeks it can be near 15-25 % of my time. It is for this reason I wanted to think about my workflow and put in some automation to help me with the process. I am currently living almost exclusively in denote - the fantastic notes package by Prot. The real aim here is to remove as much cognitive load as possible and reduce the amount of time needed in preparation of interviews....
I have heard wonderful things about gptel - the Emacs package that gives an interface to various LLMs. I will admit however I really struggled to get this working using my OpenAI API key with the Docs in their GitHub. Below is a quick guide for anyone else that got stuck - running a Linux machine. First things, get gptel installed - add the below to your config: (use-package gptel :ensure t) (setq gptel-api-key (getenv "OPENAI_API_KEY")) You will notice here we have to specify out OpenAI API key....
When it comes to quickly pulling in images into my org documents, org-download is superb. This package is a critical part of my workflow and I use it daily on my Windows work system. Having a Windows system at work1 means that some of the cool functions that work with org-download do not function due to the limitation put on my by corporate policy. One of those is pasting images from the clipboard....
Intro I wanted to share a quick tool I’ve been using recently to up my writing - emacs-langtool. This is a tool that bring spell and grammar checking tools you would expect in modern word processing suites into Emacs. It is also free, open source and can be run locally without an internet connection. Set-up Download Languagetool and extract it into a folder on your system. Also make sure you have Java installed too....
Intro Change has an energy barrier. To do anything new you need help to get over that hump, make a change, and enjoy the rewards of your new situation. I have written in the past about my efforts to remove distractions by limiting my phone’s functionality with, if I’m being honest, the aim to remove doom-scrolling and short form content. Ideally becoming a more present person who, when they do consume content, consumes high-quality content mindfully....
Emacs as a Daemon This guide will get emacs running as a server on Linux systems. This means that each time you load a file emacs is ready and doesn’t need to load. On some systems emacs start up times can be several seconds so having emacs there and ready to go can save you some real time and improve your workflows. I always forget how to do this so this guide is for me more than anyone else!...
Late last week my publication on the use of emacs within chemical R&D came out of early access. The full article can be found here. I wanted to use this space to address some of the comments I’ve seen posted about the early access version that went up in October. First of all - it has been great to see the positive reception this has had. This has been picked up by a few people, many of whom I follow - including John Kitchen and Irreal....
Background It has become clear over the last year of constant emacs use for almost all my work - that this workflow is key to my long term sustainable productivity. Emacs allows for complex tasks to be completed effortlessly with planning, content production and publishing handled without any issues. Importantly customizability is key and baked in. It has also became clear that learning the language of emacs - elisp - is going to be a super useful tool that will allow me the flexibility to continue using this tool indefinably with the agility that I need....
The Use of YASnippet to Super Charge Science Workflows Emacs (specifically the Spacemacs distro) has become my go to tool for almost all my scientific work. Writing and producing documents, organising my day and all data analysis and plotting is now done within emacs. The move away from GUI based applications to a more keyboard orientated workflows has allowed me to create at the speed I think. One of the key tools for that is YASnippet....