SoylentNews

My editor of choice (Brackets) has decided to break without explanation -- again. And I've realized that this more or less happens *every single goddamn time I run updates*. And I just went through trying a dozen or so editors about a year ago when I switched to Brackets from Kate, and all of them sucked, Brackets was merely the least awful choice.

So I finally decided...fuck it all, let's try emacs.

It's been going alright so far, but I could use some advice for managing multiple files/buffers/frames/windows/panes/whatever and I figured some of you might have some suggestions. I've played with elscreen, speedbar, sr-speedbar...and a few others I looked at but didn't install because they didn't seem quite right. I like how elscreen manages the screens, but not how it displays the menu; I like how sr-speedbar displays the menu, but not how it manages screens. I specifically don't want something like workspaces which, as I understand it, would require me to type out a name every time I want to create or change tabs. I want to either scroll through them and select one, or just tap M-<right> to open the next item in the list.

I like elscreen because I can easily load up a number of tabs, I can save that session when I close emacs, and I can easily switch files with hotkeys. I also like that I can have one tab with multiple panes, so I could group together files that I need to use together. The problem is that it seems to have a ten tab limit, which isn't going to be enough, and also I'd prefer the "tabs" to be in a sidebar rather than along the top of the window.

sr-speedbar gives me the sidebar I want -- sort of -- but it lacks a lot of the other functionality I like from elscreen. Firstly, I have to swap over to the sr-speedbar frame before I can do anything, and I don't see any options so far to bind a key sequence to next/previous buffer or anything like that. And once I select a file, it opens in a pane below whatever file I'm currently working on, when I'd rather have it occupy the entire editor window. It's also not great that sr-speedbar will leave buffer mode every time I select a file, so then I have to go reset it. And it would also be nice to get a bit of the path in the sidebar, not just the filename -- I might want to open both "~/bin/script.sh" and also "~/git/project/bin/script.sh" and it'd be nice to know which script.sh I'm looking at...

I'm sure I can change some of this by modifying the code, and I'm not opposed to that, I just want to find the best place to start so I'm not reinventing the wheel twenty times over. Or maybe there's just a few lines I need to drop in my .emacs that I haven't found yet. I'm also open to any other fun emacs tools or tips anyone would like to share...been reading through docs and manuals and such a bit, but since my existing editor is no longer functional I'm in a bit of a hurry to get something usable up and running before I start screwing it all up by playing with email and web browsers and all that other fun stuff :)

So I was setting up xscreensaver using phosphor and was looking for a plaintext version of Soylent to feed into it. Couldn't find one though, so I've ended up with the following awk script. Posted here in case anyone else wants to save five minutes point out a way to do this in one line :)

# Print plaintext headlines from SoylentNews.org

curl https://soylentnews.org/index.atom 2>/dev/null | awk '
/entry/{
  if(title != "" && summary != "")
    {
    sub("<summary[^>]*>", "", summary)
    gsub("&lt;", "<", summary)
    gsub("&gt;", ">", summary)
    gsub("</p>", "\n", summary)
    gsub("<[^>]*>", "", summary)
    gsub("’", "'"'"'", summary)
    gsub("—", "--", summary)
    gsub("[“”]", "\"", summary)
    print title
    print department" dept. |  posted by: "author
    print summary
    print "\n"
    }

  title=""
  summary=""
  author=""
  department=""
  summary=""
}
/<title>/ {
  gsub("<.?title>", "", $0)
  title=$0
}
/<summary [^>]*>/ {
  description=1
}
/<\/summary>/ {
  description=0
}
/<name>/ {
  gsub("<.?name>", "", $0)
  author=$0
}
/<slash:department>/ {
  gsub("<.?slash:department>", "", $0)
  department=$0
}
{
  if(description == 1)
    { summary = summary""$0 }
}'

[ I've been kinda obsessed with this idea for a while. Have posted something similar under the same title a few other places, although I decided to completely rewrite it here given the more technical audience and the amount of time I have to kill tonight at work ;) ]

So, holograms have long been a staple of sci-fi techologies. And there's a lot of projects that have been working on making these a reality in some way. We've got 3D TVs on the lower-end, and crazy laser and water mist projection systems in labs. But there doesn't seem to be any true, free-floating holograms coming any time soon. That stuff is HARD.

On the other hand...perhaps we can do better. We have Google Glass. We have the Oculus Rift. We have augmented reality apps. How long before we can start to merge these product lines? How long before you can run an augmented reality app projecting 3D images on your smart contact lenses? Given that there are ALREADY prototype technologies to project onto a pair of contacts, I don't think it will be that long. A couple decades, surely, but I'm 23 years old now, so I expect to see that in my lifetime. After all, this isn't revolutionary new tech anymore, just incremental improvements to products you can already purchase.

Now, I said this would be *better* than true holograms. But there's an obvious disadvantage -- you have to wear something. So what's the upside? No hologram projector for one. Not limited to a specific space. Instead of merely controlling what my hologram projector creates in my own apartment, I can control what holograms are projected to me everywhere in the world. It can work around corners and such where any kind of projection may be difficult or impossible. And different people can see different images.

So what happens should this techology become ubiquitous? What's this got to do with the title of "Euthenasia of Consumerism"?

With this tech, you sure as hell don't need a TV. You don't really need a computer. You don't need anything decorative. Anything you don't directly interact with can be projected. But you can go even further than that -- all aesthetic aspects could eventually be virtualized. Everyone can buy the same plain white everything, and project whatever designs they want onto it. No stains either!

So you end up with that ultimate sci-fi apartment, where you press a button and your bedroom becomes the office which becomes the living room. Blast this signal through your wifi router, and everyone who enters your apartment sees the same. Or have some security settings -- your mom sees one decor while your friends see another. Even if they're in the same room together.

And then you open-source this stuff. Or pirate it. Whatever. Screw the 3D printers, half your apartment is now just code. And the only skill you need to DIY all of that is the ability to program. Or not even that -- just the ability to write themes for someone else's program. Or for the lazy, walk into someone else's home and *control-C* the TV.

Yeah, you can't virtualize everything, but looking around my apartment I could certainly virtualize all the most expensive things. The computers, the projector, even the stereo system. And most of the things I haven't gotten to yet because I don't feel like spending the money fall into that category as well. And hey, my nightstand may already be a cardboard box, but at least it could not look like one ;)

So, am I just nuts, or are we inching towards a global economic collapse in the best possible way?