stanton's posterous

Some Notes on Setting Up Emacs 24 with Emacs Starter Kit v2

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 21:01:00 -0700

I use the Emacs Starter Kit as the basis for my Emacs configuration. This past weekend I decided to try using the v2 branch which requires installing most of the configuration using the Emacs package manager that is built in to Emacs 24. I reinstalled Emacs 24, just to make sure I was current, using homebrew:

brew install emacs --cocoa --HEAD --use-git-head

I copied my personalization file from my main git branch into the v2 branch. This also required adding the package site noted in the branch's README. I then installed clojure-mode after loading the package manager with M-x package-list-packages.

I think a few things that either clojure-mode or Emacs Starter Kit set up were missing, so I had to add the startup hook to start paredit-mode when clojure-mode starts up. I didn't have to do that with the previous versions of the starter kit and clojure-mode.

(defun turn-on-paredit () (paredit-mode 1)) (add-hook 'clojure-mode-hook 'turn-on-paredit)

I reinstalled the Leiningen swank-clojure plugin, which I had uninstalled at some point when I was having problems: lein plugin install swank-clojure 1.3.1.

Something new to me on the swank-clojure README was the new clojure-mode command, lein clojure-jack-in, which automatically starts a SLIME session from Emacs for a Leiningen project.

All that was pretty straight-forward, but I did have to add one more thing to my Emacs personalization file so that Emacs's shell would find lein on the path. Before making that change the shell path was the basic shell path that didn't include anything in either my ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc.

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My First Time To Use Time Machine

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 07:58:03 -0700

Today was a first for me on my Mac. I finally had to use Time Machine to recover a file.

I was typing in Emacs this morning and none of my TextExpander snippets were firing. I thought it might be a problem with the interaction between Emacs and TextExpander, but they were working a couple of days ago, and one was working. I took a look in TextExpander and discovered that all my snippet groups were gone. The one expansion that was working was a default snippet. I poked around the file system a bit and found the TextExpander snippets file.

My computer was frozen when I got home last night, so I forced it to shut down and start. I suspected something happened to TextExpander when the computer froze or was forced to shut down. So I went into Time Machine and browsed back to yesterday and compared the TextExpander settings file sizes to today's file. Today's file size was under 100 KB and yesterday's was 1.8 MB. I selected the older file and chose to recover it and replaced the existing file. My snippets instantly showed up in TextExpander.

I'm hoping TextExpander was the only thing affected by the computer freeze/shutdown yesterday.

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New Fujitsu ScanSnap and Acrobat Pro OCR

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:10:00 -0800

I have a Brother MFC printer/scanner which I have been using to scan my documents. I hadn't used it in a while and now am having trouble getting my Mac to use it. The Brother Control Center gives me an error, as does Acrobat Professional—obtained with a CS3 bundle—when I tell it to scan. Oddly enough Apple's Image Capture application will scan from the Brother device.

Regardless, it is slow as it can only scan one side at a time, though it is a duplex scanner so I only have to feed it through once, but multiple page documents seem to take forever. I had basically given up on scanning my documents with it, but I hadn't really thought about why. I now think I stopped because there is so much time between documents that there is no flow when doing multiple documents.

I looked at using Pixily, now called OfficeDrop, but I didn't want to have a monthly charge, among other reasons not to use them. I just wanted to send a bulk shipment, so I passed on them.

I've read about the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners and was intrigued, but not enough to shell out the money. Currently I'm trying to simplify by getting rid of things, and that includes old files, so I decided to look another look at a dedicated document scanner. I looked at the reviews of the Epson GT-S50, the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300, and the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M. The S1300 is Fujitsu's portable scanner that is almost $150 less, but a review at the Lawyerist on it convinced me to look at a full-size document scanner.

The Epson scanner is newer, so there are fewer reviews for it, though it does sound like a capable scanner. It's a TWAIN scanner so any TWAIN-compliant application should be able to use it, whereas the ScanSnap relies on Fujitsu's application to interface with the scanner. The TWAIN feature and some of the other features of the Epson almost convinced me. But the Fujitsu S1500M is a more well-known (and well-reviewed) scanner, so it seemed like there were fewer unknowns in going with it. If I had to use my scanner with both Macs and Windows PCs, I might have gone with the Epson, but I'm pure Mac at home, so there was no reason.

I got the S1500M from Amazon last night and after the software installer screwed up—it was hanging at the last stage—I was good to go for scanning. It is so much faster than the existing Brother MFC scanner. Apparently the Epson was a little faster than the ScanSnap, but compared to the Brother MFC scanner, any difference between the two dedicated document scanners would be marginal.

I've also been relying on Evernote to make the PDFs searchable, but I found out this week that Acrobat Professional has an OCR and deskewing feature built in, so I already had a decent solution. A little more digging found an AppleScript droplet someone else had already created that takes a stack of files and feeds them through Acrobat, so I gave that a shot today and it works like a charm. It does increase the file size some, but I figure that's worth the added flexibility. Now the more sensitive documents I store locally can be searched by Spotlight and the rest can go into Evernote.

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Third Attempt at Home-Made Ice Cream

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:44:34 -0700

We've been trying to make a low-sugar ice cream at home. The first batch used strawberries, no sugar at all, milk, and cream. Next was blueberry with a little honey, more cream, less milk, and eggs. The second batch was better, but still seemed too milky.

The latest attempt began with preparation this past weekend. J-- wanted to use grapes this time. Most of the grapes at the Union Square farmers' market were Concord grapes with seed, but there was one farmer at the very end selling several varieties of tasty seedless grapes. J-- decided to use even less milk this time, more eggs, and the same amount of honey. The biggest difference from last time to this time was adding Crème de cassis. Keeping the ice cream creamier was the main incentive for adding alcohol, but two tablespoons of Crème de cassis gave it a strong flavor of alcohol. I imagine the grapes gave it a sweeter flavor as well, but it was hard to tell with the overpowering alcohol flavor. The ice cream felt smoother and thicker than the previous efforts, but our problem may be that we're comparing ours to commercial ice cream. The commercial ice creams use special ingredients just to modify the texture, which we don't want to do. I suggested trying just a small quantity of grain alcohol since it won't have any taste.

It was good, and I'm looking forward to the next experiment with the ice cream maker.

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Homemade No-Sugar Strawberry Ice Cream

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 18:29:59 -0700

Last week I got fed up with all of the store-bought ice creams. They all have too much sugar or sugar-like substances and too many "food science" chemicals. So my girlfriend and I decided to try making our own, and I bought a Cuisinart ice cream maker.

Today was the first experiment. We used the strawberry ice cream recipe from the Cuisinart recipe--but removed ALL the sugar.

It came out tasting too milky, so we put some strawberries on top and drizzled on some raw honey. That was enough to balance it out. It actually tasted all right. It was a good first experiment. What will we try for the next experiment?

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