Shallow Thoughts : : Jun

Overriding Emacs' Broken Bookmark Position Code (Updated)

(Note: I've updated this post: see the solution at the end.)

Emacs has a useful function called bookmarks, where you can make short names for files you visit often.

But bookmarks has one terrible misfeature: it also remembers your position in the file.

That sounds like a good thing, right? But the problem is that the bookmarks system only records these positions sporadically. So it's easy to get stuck on a position you were editing months ago.

For example: I have a bookmark for the file where I keep track of appointments and other calendar entries. But lately, every time I open this bookmark, it opens it with the cursor positioned on September 24. That's three months away; its not the part of the file I'm interested in right now.

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Full Self Driving

They're doing roadwork on the highway near the house.

This is the sort of paving where they melt the old pavement, chew it all up into little pieces, mix it with tar or something then smear it back on the road.

They do it all at one time: there's a procession of trucks that each does a different step, and they all move together at a slow walking pace.

We rode our bikes over to watch it happening, and we noticed something interesting.

There's no one driving any of the trucks! They all have a cab, but the driver's seat is empty.

There's a person walking alongside the lead truck. He isn't holding any obvious control mechanism, though.

I never knew that road paving was an application where they're already using "full self driving".

Video Streaming from Linux

As part of a set-top video project, I looked into streaming. Just local streaming: we have a fileserver in one part of the house, running Linux, and the set-top box by the TV (also running Linux though that part is less important); how can I stream a video from the fileserver and play it using mpv on the set-top box?

I thought that would be a dead simple question to answer. But there's surprisingly little related to that that shows up in Google's increasingly broken web search, and what I found in the actual documentation for various programs I tried didn't work.

TL;DR It turns out I probably won't be using this, because it's actually much easier just to mount the fileserver's video directory with sshfs and pretend the video files are local files. Still, I'd been curious about how to do video streaming, and I did find several ways to do it. So here's what I learned.

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LineageOS on a Pixel 3a

I installed LineageOS on the old Pixel 3a that's been sitting in a drawer! I've been meaning to try that forever, but never got around to it. The installation experience was pretty good, and Lineage works great, giving a new lease on life to a device that otherwise could be leaching out toxic chemicals in a landfill. (Though I confess it was actually sitting in a drawer, in case I ever found a use for it, like all my other old phones and laptops.)

First, I want to stress how very old the Pixel 3a is. It was first released in 2019 and discontinued in 2020. It's wonderful that LineageOS still offers an OS that works on a phone this old. It means that rather than throwing old phones away, contributing to e-waste, an old phone can be repurposed to do something useful.

Installation was remarkably easy on the 3a, though not totally without hiccups.

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