Fossil Files: My .Emacs

December 10, 2022 by Elliot Williams 63 Comments

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.

Featured image: “A Dusty Old Book” by Marco Verch Professional.

Ask Hackaday: Will Your 2030 Car Have AM Radio?

December 9, 2022 by Al Williams 171 Comments

Car makers have been phasing out AM radios in their cars for quite some time. Let’s face it, there isn’t much on AM these days, and electric vehicles have been known to cause interference with AM radios. So why have them? For that matter, many aftermarket head units now don’t even have radios at all. They play digital media or stream Bluetooth from your phone. However, a U.S. Senator, Edward J. Markey, has started a letter-writing campaign to the major car makers urging them to retain the AM radio in their future vehicles.

So does that mean AM lives? Or will the car makers kill it off? The letter requests that the companies answer several questions, including if they plan to discontinue AM or FM radios in the near future and if they support digital broadcast radio.

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Hackaday Podcast 196: Flexing Hard PCBs, Dangers Of White Filament, And The Jetsons’ Kitchen Computer

December 9, 2022 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi start the Hackaday Podcast by talking about another podcast that’s talking about…Hackaday. Or more accurately, the recent Hackaday Supercon. After confirming the public’s adoration, conversation moves on to designing flexible PCBs with code, adding a rotary dial to your mechanical keyboard, and a simulator that lets you visualize an extinction-level event. We’ll wrap things up by playing the world’s smallest violin for mildly inconvenienced closed source software developers, and wonder how the world might have been different if the lady of the house had learned to read binary back in 1969.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download the podcast and play it on your Palm Pilot!

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Build A Better Mousetrap… But It Better Be Better!

December 8, 2022 by Al Williams 22 Comments

As creative problem solvers, we like to “think outside the box,” and we should strive for that. But what happens if your strange idea isn’t kept in check by cooler heads? There is a real danger — especially if you work alone — to falling so in love with your idea, that you lose sight of what it really means to be better.

Case in point. The self-parking car. Well, not the modern variant, which seems to work pretty well. But did you know that the self-parking car was invented in the 1930s and used an extra fifth wheel? Hard to imagine? See the video below. History tells us that the idea didn’t catch on.

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Singapore Branches Out Into Internet Of Trees

December 8, 2022 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

Five years ago, a 38-year-old woman was enjoying an outdoor concert with her family with one of her twin infants in her arms. In the week prior, it had been windy and rainy, but today, the weather was nice, and the concert was crowded. Without warning, a 270-year-old tembusu tree fell on the woman, pinning and ultimately killing her after the other concertgoers couldn’t remove it in time. This tragedy happened in spite of twice-yearly inspections where the tree showed no visual signs of trouble.

It’s exactly this type of incident that Singaporean officials hope to avoid by building an Internet of Trees. The equatorial island nation is home to roughly 5.5 million people, and around 7 million trees — about 6 million of which are tracked by Singapore’s National Parks Board, so that they can be managed remotely with an app. (The Board only tracks trees once they’ve reached a certain size, so we’ll assume that the other million are too young to join the fun just yet.)

While tree-triggered deaths are fairly few and far between, there are plenty of other ‘tree incidents’ that can occur, such as a branch falling, or a tree trunk snapping or uprooting. Depending on the size of the branch, this can be a dangerous nuisance as it could block roads, obscure signage, or destroy property. Thanks to the efforts of the National Parks Board, these incidents have dropped from around 3,000 per year at the turn of the millennium to under 500 per year today.

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Love AI, But Don’t Love It Too Much

December 7, 2022 by Jenny List 51 Comments

The up-and-coming Wonder of the World in software and information circles , and particularly in those circles who talk about them, is AI. Give a magic machine a lot of stuff, ask it a question, and it will give you a meaningful and useful answer. It will create art, write books, compose music, and generally Change The World As We Know It. All this is genuinely impressive stuff, as anyone who has played with DALL-E will tell you. But it’s important to think about what the technology can and can’t do that’s new so as to not become caught up in the hype, and in doing that I’m immediately drawn to a previous career of mine. Continue reading “Love AI, But Don’t Love It Too Much” →

Review: Inkplate 2 Shrinks Down, Adds Color

December 7, 2022 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

Regular Hackaday readers may recall the Inkplate family of devices: open source all-in-one development boards that combine the power and versatility of the ESP32 with electronic paper displays salvaged from commercial e-readers. By taking the sharp, high-speed, displays intended for readers such as Amazon’s Kindle and bundling it together with all the hardware and software you need to make it work, the Inkplate provided a turn-key platform for anyone looking to get serious with e-paper.

Given the fact that their screens were pulled from recycled readers, it’s no surprise the previous Inkplate entries came in familiar 6 and 10 inch variants. There was even an upgraded 6 inch model that benefited from newer reader technology by adopting a touch-sensitive backlit panel, which we took a close look at last year. Their large displays make them excellent for wall mounted applications, such as a household notification center or constantly-changing art display. Plus, as you might expect, the Inkplate is an ideal choice for anyone looking to roll their own custom e-reader.

But of course, not every application needs so much screen real estate. In fact, for some tasks, such a large display could be considered a liability. Seeing a void in their existing product lineup, the folks at Soldered Electronics (previously e-radionica) have recently unveiled the diminutive Inkplate 2. This new miniature Inkplate uses the same software library as its larger predecessors, but thanks to its 2.13 inch three-color display, lends itself to a wider array of potential projects. Plus it’s considerably cheaper than the larger Inkplate models, at just $35 USD.

Considering the crowd sourced funding campaign for the Inkplate 2 blew past its goal in just 72 hours, it seems clear there’s plenty of interest in this new smaller model. But if you’re still not sure if it’s the e-paper solution you’ve been waiting for, maybe we can help — the folks at Soldered sent along a pre-production version of the Inkplate 2 for us to play around with, so let’s take it for a test drive and see what all the fuss is about.

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