As I said in my last post, I'm moving to a new Hugo theme. I decided on Anubis. It's simple and clean. Unfortunately, in this change over, many things broke. Specifically, all my embedded html. Using earlier version of Hugo I could directly embed HTML and it would render. Now I have to bracket the HTML with special org markup - #+begin_export html and #+end_export html. #+begin_export html <h1>html stuff to render goes in here </h1> #+end_export Minimally I had to find all my embedded videos and all my embedded Tweets.

I woke up to this tweet by Mark Guzdial today:#pro-version-or ed-version.org# An indication that CS Ed in US high schools is about vocational training: 2 (of 5) recommended sessions at the @csteachersorg conference are on Github and Agile. Is @CSforAll a Silicon Valley jobs program? https://t.co/n8ugnmTU84 — Mark Guzdial (@guzdial) May 28, 2020 This led to a lively discussion throughout the day with lots of likes and lots of comments.

As we scrambled to move online in March we used what we knew, what we heard of and what we were allowed. This usually meant Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams. I settled on Zoom. It worked and worked pretty well. There were a few things I felt they could improve on but given that Zoom wasn't designed as a teaching tool I've been pretty happy with it. Now that the emergency rush has passed we have time to see if there are some better alternatives.

I made this video write after I made the openwith one so even though I don't mention anything in this video, I wanted to share some updates on dired and openwith. I got a lot of suggestions on alternate ways to achieve the workflow I was seeking - being able to open a file using an external viewer. One person noted that under newer versions of Emacs, the W key is bound to the command (browse-url-of-dired-file) which does exactly what I wanted.

I spend most of my time in Emacs but still use the shell and browser for some things. One of the things I use my shell for is to launch libreoffice to view and edit docx files and spreadsheets, evince for pdf files and imagemagick for image files. Yes, I know I can view all of these in Emacs but there are a few limitations: Emacs chokes on large files I can't edit the docx file or the image So, I hop to the shell and launch the program I need on the files in question.

Zoom has been on a wild ride. As teachers scrambled to try to deliver instruction from there homes to student homes Zoom quickly became a favorite. It was easy, performed well, and had features that other services seemed to lack. Features like being able to mute students and for me a big one - breakout rooms. Now, these features weren't flawless as I mentioned in my last post but that's okay.

I spent part of today cleaning up my Emacs workflow. Specifically, how I capture emails and links into org-mode I already wrote about how I used org-capture (here and here). It's pretty clean and easy but there was one thing that always nagged at me. When I capture from mu4e within Emacs by hitting C-c m it's set up to automatically populate the capture template with a link to the email labelled with the email's subject.

Hunter, like most other schools has gone remote. I taught my first two online classes on Thursday. Currently, I'm using Zoom for synchronous stuff and a mailing list and slack for async. There are still some missing pieces. When we're all together, it's easy to look at a student's work and talk them through issues. It's also easy to get students to work together, at least to a point. With everyone locked up in their own homes, real time collaboration is harder.

I maintain a couple of small simple web sites. One provides information about my undergraduate honors CS program and another that isn't live yet is a FAQ for my CS teacher certification program. Traditionally I would use ssh to connect to the host machine, fire up Emacs and edit the html files to update the sites. I always forget that with Emacs we can do better. One way is with Tramp Mode.

I've been meaning to do my version of the Emacs VI rant for a while. A few years ago I staged out a video showing what it would be like for a beginner to start with Emacs, Vim, Atom, and Sublime Text but decided it would be long, unwieldy and clunky to present - particularly when it came to customization. I tabled it for a while but recently have been seeing a bunch of threads, videos and posts talking about Emacs and Vim.