so this is where the slack notification sound could come from

Nearly 1 year after finding out where old msn notification sound came from, I just was listening to this St Germain song that has something similar for slack notifications. Not sure it's the exact same sound, but it could very well be. At least, It took me half of the song to realize noone was pinging me in slack....

Some Lua articles

So at my job we're heavy Lua(jit) users. I've always liked Lua since I discovered it a few years ago.

It has a scheme-y feeling to it (with paredit unfriendly syntax, unfortunately). So here's a new article that has been recently published in the ACM. And some other paper from 2011. And another very nice paper that shows how lua can be used in different programming styles. Like the old "Implementation of Lua 5.0" or the lpeg one (you search that link yourself), Lua maintainers have a very concise style of designing and writing. Both code and papers. I always enjoy them.

Old OOP lecture by Dan Ingalls

So here's this great talk where Dan Ingalls shows OOP concepts with superb clarity.

staging hunks without magit

So there's magit that allows you to stage hunks as if you were doing "git add -p".  And I love it, but sometimes magit feels like too much, and it's slower than using vc.

I've been using git-gutter for some time, and I think there's a nice potential for staging hunks with it.

(use-package git-gutter
  :ensure t
  :config (global-git-gutter-mode t)
  :bind ("C-x v s" .  git-gutter:stage-hunk)
  ("C-x v n" .  git-gutter:next-hunk)
  ("C-x v p" .  git-gutter:previous-hunk))

With these configs (I'm using use-package), you can navigate through hunks with c-x v n/p (I'm basing the keybinds on vc "c-x v" ones) and stage them with "c-x v s". 

I'm pretty happy with those, only missing the ability of staging several hunks at once within a region.

kill-ring-max is a thing

So I recently discovered the variable `kill-ring-max', that dictates the size of the kill-ring, meaning when items on the kill-ring will be discarded.  Its original value is 60, and for some reason I still had it set to the default.

It's strange that I hadn't seen it mentioned before (at least, enough times to pay attention to it,) so let's try to increase the awareness of this very useful variable.

If you use helm-show-kill-ring, or something that allows you to search through kill-ring, having a bigger kill-ring might allow you to recover s"lost" work.

The Algernon Argument

From Here:

That intelligence (g) in healthy people is nearly impossible to improve is clear from the failure of psychology to provide any such method. But why intelligence would be so constant is not as clear: many other cognitive abilities are improvable (like working memory), so why not intelligence?

Adopting org-gcal.el

I just wanted to announce that I recently adopted org-gcal.

This great emacs mode imports google calendar events to your org files, and has some support for exporting events to your google calendars.

The author went missing in action for more than a year, and there were some nasty bugs in master that made the initial experience quite disappointing. Most of the bugs had Pull Requests opened, but still pending to be merged. So I decided to adopt the package to give it some love, and since last week, the melpa link points to my repo instead of @myuhe's.

Big props to the original author and also the many users of the module that helped with the migration.

If you use org-gcal, my recommendation is to update the package, and it will only improve your experience. There's an ongoing big refactoring that uses oauth2.el to manage all the tokens and oauth, but it still have issues that I haven't figured out how to solve in an elegant way.
Of course, if you have suggestions (or even better, code) for org-gcal, please direct them to https://github.com/kidd/org-gcal.el .