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Welcome to the
System Crafters Newsletter!
Issue #002 - May 18, 2023
by David Wilson
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== Contents ==
1. Introduction
2. The Future of System Crafters Chat
3. Tips of the Week
4. Crafter News
5. Friday's Stream - Exploring the Depths of Dired
6. Closing
== Introduction ==
Welcome to the new issue of the System Crafters Newsletter!
First of all, I want to say thank you to all of you who signed up for the
newsletter and checked out the new System Crafters website last week, it was
awesome to have such a positive response!
I got a lot of great feedback after last week's newsletter and I'm hoping to
integrate some of it as the weeks go on. If you're a new reader and you have
feedback about this issue, please feel free to send an e-mail to
xxxxxx@systemcrafters.net or just reply to this e-mail!
== The Future of System Crafters Chat ==
Early in the history of the System Crafters channel, I created a Discord for
viewers of the channel to hang out, trade Emacs and Guix tips, and share other
cool things that they learned.
Over time, I started to regret choosing Discord for a variety of reasons, but
the primary reason being that it doesn't give community members the freedom to
engage with the chat using their client of choice (especially Emacs!).
Today I'm changing that! I just posted an announcement that we're now going to
call Matrix and IRC home (bridged, of course) and that I'm deactivating the
System Crafters Discord server on July 1, 2023.
You can read more information about the history of this change here:
-> https://systemcrafters.net/news/moving-from-discord-to-matrix-irc/
I hope you all feel the same as I do, that this is a positive change for the
community! Please feel free to reply to this e-mail to let me know your
thoughts.
NOTE: Since making this post, I've noticed that the IRC -> Matrix bridge is not
working correctly! Messages are not propagating from IRC back to Matrix. I'm
actively investigating this issue and hope to have it fixed soon!
== Tips of the Week ==
* Scheduling regular time blocks in your Org Mode Agenda
If you're like me, you probably need to establish some structure in your daily
schedule to ensure that you take care of certain responsibilities. These time
blocks might be at different times on different days of the week!
I started looking for a way to put such a schedule right into my Org Mode Agenda
and it turns out there's a pretty easy way to do that!
Here's what I did:
1. Create an Org file that will hold your daily schedule. I called mine
"Schedule.org"
2. Create headings for each of the time blocks you want to schedule on your
calendar. The text of each entry should end in the time range that the block
should cover, like "12:00-14:00" for 12pm to 2pm.
See below these bullet points for a complete example of what this looks like!
3. Add the following line directly under each heading to choose which days of
the week that the time block applies to:
<%%(memq (calendar-day-of-week date) '(1 2 3 4 5))>
That line will make the entry appear from Monday through Friday of each week!
Here are the numbers that correlate to each day of the week:
0 - Sunday
1 - Monday
2 - Tuesday
3 - Wednesday
4 - Thursday
5 - Friday
6 - Saturday
The list in this line can have any combination of week days! For only
Monday-Wednesday-Friday, use '(1 3 5), etc.
4. Add the schedule .org file to your `org-agenda-files` list:
(add-to-list 'org-agenda-files "~/Notes/Schedule.org")
5. Open up the daily agenda and take a look! Execute the `org-agenda` command
and press `a` for the daily agenda.
Here's a full example straight out of my own schedule file!
TIP: Use context tag names as your heading titles so you know how to filter
your agenda for each time block!
```
** Morning Block
*** @writing @plan 06:00-07:00
<%%(memq (calendar-day-of-week date) '(0 1 2 3 4 5 6))>
*** @email @accounting @easy 09:00-10:00
<%%(memq (calendar-day-of-week date) '(1 2 3 4 5))>
*** @hacking 10:00-12:00
<%%(memq (calendar-day-of-week date) '(1 2 3 5))>
*** @creative 10:00-12:00
<%%(memq (calendar-day-of-week date) '(4 5))>
** Afternoon Block
*** @creative 13:00-14:00
<%%(memq (calendar-day-of-week date) '(1 2 3))>
*** @hacking 13:00-14:00
<%%(memq (calendar-day-of-week date) '(4 5))>
*** @work 14:00-18:00
<%%(memq (calendar-day-of-week date) '(1 2 3 4))>
** Evening Block
*** @work @calls 20:00-22:00
<%%(memq (calendar-day-of-week date) '(1 2 3 4))>
```
So how does this work?
Org Mode can integrate with Emacs' diary functionality to add diary entries and
dates to the agenda. The special <%% ... > syntax represents an Emacs Lisp
expression that evaluates to diary dates. The Org Agenda will pick up on the
diary dates that come from this expression and then insert them in the agenda.
You should experiment with this and possibly find other ways to apply it!
This seems to work out of the box for me, but if for some reason it doesn't for
you, try setting the following variable:
(setq org-agenda-include-diary t)
More information can be found in the Org Mode manual here:
-> https://orgmode.org/manual/Weekly_002fdaily-agenda.html
I really like this approach! If you have any tips of your own about this
strategy please let me know about them!
* Discovering more Guix packages via community channels
One of the great things about GNU Guix is that you can easily add package
channels to get access to packages that don't come in the default Guix channel.
If you've followed my tutorial on installing Guix System then you're probably
familiar with the Nonguix channel.
But there are many other community channels out there, each of which containing
their own sets of useful packages. How do you find them?
That's where this site comes in!
-> https://toys.whereis.みんな
-> https://toys.whereis.xn--q9jyb4c/ (if the previous link doesn't work)
This is a searchable repository of packages and services that come from the
official Guix channel, Nonguix, and a few other community channels! If you
want to see the list of channels that are indexed, check out this link:
-> https://toys.whereis.みんな/channels
Kudos to jgart and the Where is Everyone crew for putting this together! You
can learn more about the project here:
-> https://sr.ht/~whereiseveryone/guixrus/
== Crafter News ==
Here are some interesting news items in the broader sphere of system crafting:
* Nyxt browser version 3.0 has just been released!
Nyxt is an interesting Emacs-inspired web browser written with Common Lisp.
I know quite a few members of the System Crafters community have tried it out
and many have told me they like it a lot! I've had mixed results with it, but
I'm patiently waiting for the day when I can make it my primary browser.
This week, the new major version of Nyxt has been released! This release
promises a variety of new features and bug fixes, so I'm optimistic that it will
be an improvement for my use cases.
Read more about the release and all the new features on the Nyxt website:
-> https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/article/release-3.0.0.org
I might check it out on stream as soon as it gets updated in Guix!
* Try the second pretest for the upcoming Emacs 29.1 release!
The official Emacs 29 seems to be getting closer every day! Recently Eli
Zaretskii sent out an e-mail to emacs-devel asking people to try out the latest
pretest build for Emacs 29.1.
If you're excited about the upcoming release, give this build a try and report
any issues you find with it!
-> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2023-05/msg00379.html
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== Friday's Stream - Exploring the Depths of Dired ==
In tomorrow's stream, we'll explore the depths of Emacs' Dired feature to see if
we can discover some of its lesser-known capabilities. We'll try to figure out
bulk file operations, file previews, advanced Dired buffer tricks, and more. If
you use Dired for basic file management capabilities, this is our chance to
figure out more valuable ways to use it!
The stream will go live at Friday, May 12th at 6PM EEST (UTC+3),
check your local time on this page: https://time.is/compare/1800_in_Athens
You can find the stream at these URLs:
-> https://youtube.com/live/h6ZssDbEt4A
-> https://twitch.tv/SystemCrafters
-> https://systemcrafters.net/live-streams/may-19-2023/
== Closing ==
I hope you enjoyed this issue of the System Crafters Newsletter! I always want
to improve and streamline the content as time goes on so please send me your
thoughts and feedback by replying directly to this e-mail!
Until next time, Happy Hacking!
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David Wilson
xxxxxx@systemcrafters.net
