Machine Learning Refined, with nice blog posts by Jeremy Watt & Reza Borhani.

Let’s start Season 4 of The 100 in a few minutes.

I still read Mastering Emacs from time to time. Recently, I was just checking an article on regular expression. I have been using Emacs for about 15 years and I am afraid that now I would be far more comfortable with most key chords after two or three years of Spacemacs. This is not that I really like modal editing–I don’t like it at all in fact–but the consistent key bindings conveyed via which-key and the configuration layers for most packages make it a really pleasant tool to use on a daily basis. I’ve come to have only Emacs on my desktop. No more iTerm2 or Marked2 or even Desktop icons. #emacs

The more I use Org for authoring simple or more complex text documents, the more I like. I like to think of it as Markdown with better markup for links, code blocks, tables, and references, and of course there’s Emacs inline preview. Except for collaborating with colleagues or drafting short RMarkdown documents, I mostly stopped using Markdown these days. Maybe I should just revisit some old Md files and just convert them to Org.

(defun markdown-convert-buffer-to-org ()
    "Convert the current buffer's content from markdown to orgmode format."
    (interactive)
    (shell-command-on-region (point-min) (point-max)
                             (format "pandoc -f markdown -t org -o %s"
                                     (concat (file-name-sans-extension (buffer-file-name)) ".org"))))

See also: Org-Mode Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Languages to Use for Text.

GNU Coreutils Cheat Sheet. (via @UnixToolTip)

A few days ago, I noticed someone citing A Computational Approach to Statistical Learning on Twitter. I no longer buy statistical books so I can’t tell if it is worth a read, but I note that the author of the R package bigmemory is one of the co-authors.

Just found what I think is one of the best concise tutorial on “How to GitHub” if you are looking to collaborate on a common repository. As always, it works best when you read the Magit manual and check what’s available there.

How to blog. Nice take by Tom MacWright. I don’t have a very strict schedule. However, I’ve been trying to post more or less regularly in recent years (sometimes even just links of Twitter bookmarks), specifically to avoid letting my blog die.

Today I was reading Jack Baty’s latest posts and I noticed an interesting micro-post about keyboard versus mouse usage.

The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

I think this deserves two additional remarks. First, it depends on the task at hand: For instance, even if I prefer reading email with Apple Mail I use mu4e under Emacs because I find it more convenient for bulk actions like archiving or deleting a bunch of messages. Think of it a little: You just have to use your preferred movement keys or the arrow keys and strike a key, and it’s all done! Likewise, for text editing or interacting with an REPL, I found Emacs keybindings much more powerful than any combination of custom Services or even TextExpander, together with using a mouse. I believe Vim users would agree as well. Second, this does not account for people not using a mouse at all. I for one have always been very happy with Macbook trackpad, and I come a lot slower when I have to use a mouse, notwithstanding the fact that it is very bad practice for the elbow and wrist. For most movement, I use the trackpad and I do not worry much about Emacs or Vim keybindings, because there I am faster with the trackpad. Hence, we should better clearly state what actions are better performed using a mouse before claiming than the mouse win over the keyboard.

Found a new playlist on Apple Music.