ttoday's howtos and technical posts
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University of Toronto ☛ Ten years isn't long enough for maximum age settings
If you're making an internal thing good for ten years, don't (whether it is a TLS certificate or, for example, setting a retention duration for some database). Ten years is either not long enough or too long. If you're writing an example and use a ten year validity period, please don't (people are sure to copy it). Ten years can sound like an implausibly long time when you're setting something up, but as we all know there's nothing quite as permanent as a quick hack and there you are ten years later with some problems. This happened to us with OpenVPN and we failed to find a solution, to our pain.
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Eric MacAdie ☛ Org Commands I Frequently Use
As far as I know, the next meeting of EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup group, has a planned topic: Org mode. Like Emacs itself, it is a powerful, versatile, customizable tool that will change your life. It is the Emacs of Emacs. This post will present some of the Org functions I use most frequently, as well as a few other things I use in Org. It is a sequel to my post about common Emacs commands I used before I started getting serious about Emacs and started to use M-x to call functions.
Just as with Emacs, I have barely scratched the surface of Org. But if you find it overwhelming, trying out these commands might help you get started on your Org journey.
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Nico Cartron ☛ IDLE support with OfflineIMAP
As I mentioned in my article about Mutt, I am using OfflineIMAP to synchronise my emails to my FreeBSD laptop.
I recently found out that it does support IMAP IDLE, allowing to have your emails delivered in real-time / through notifications.
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Scott Dubinsky ☛ Blender and Nvidia and Linux, Oh My!
I have a bunch of graphics-related programs I want to use. These are: Wayland, Sway, Avidemux, and Blender. I also want to use multiple monitors. I also want to use my Nvidia GPU to help me with those. This is unfortunate, because Nvidia hates linux.
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Chris ☛ Outlier Detection
A former colleague asked about outlier detection and deletion. This is a topic dear to my heart, and there are a lot of misconceptions floating around. Most importantly, people don’t realise how valuable a signal outliers are. They may be the most important part of your data, and meaningful analysis is often impossible until you have handled them properly – which does not mean blindly deleting them!
The best summary in this area I know of is Donald Wheeler’s two-part series in Quality Digest1: [...]