Erik L. Arneson — Writer and Software Developer

Configuring Orgzly Interaction with Directory Local Variables

2025-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

I use Orgzly Revived on my phone to capture to-do items, tasks, writing ideas, and projects. Its files are then synced with an ownCloud server. Those same files are also constantly open in Emacs on my computer, which means there can be some gnarly issues with things getting out of sync. It took me a while to figure out a good way to manage this, and in this brief blog post, I would like to share my solution.

Setting up a remote storage system is outside the scope of this server. Orgzly Revived works well with Dropbox, ownCloud, and nextCloud, though support for the other two is nicer as it can support automatic syncing in more situations. The Orgzly Revived documentation has an excellent description of how that configuration works.

Note that to keep things simple, I keep my Orgzly Revived files and only those files in a directory on my remote server. On my computer, the location for these files is ~/org/orgzly/, which is how I shall refer to it later on.

Configuring Orgzly Revived Auto-sync

To configure the auto-sync capabilities in Orgzly Revived, go to the settings screen in the app and then navigate to Sync > Auto-sync. Ensure that the following options are toggled on:

Auto-sync
Note created
Note updated or deleted
App started or resumed

This ensures that Orgzly Revived is constantly checking your remote storage and both fetching and uploading changes.

Configuring Emacs and Org-mode

On my computer, I want any changes that Orgzly Revived has updated to be automatically loaded into Emacs. Since I always leave Emacs running, that means it needs to detect changes on the disk for those particular files. I use two different methods to do this. First, in my init file, I have the following piece of code:

(setq orgzly-directory (expand-file-name "~/org/orgzly/"))
(add-to-list 'revert-without-query (rx bol 
                                       (eval orgzly-directory) 
                                       (+ (not "/")) ".org" 
                                       eol))

This uses the rx macro to easily create a regular expression that matches any filename ending in ".org" in the directory containing Orgzly Revived files. You may need to play around with the regular expression to get the right match. By adding those files to revert-without-query, Emacs will not bug you with extra questions and confirmations when changes are detected. However, this only works when auto-revert-mode is enabled!

At first, I thought there may be a way to enable auto-revert-mode on a file-by-file basis, but quickly realized that this could cause too many problems with creating new files in the Orgzly Revived app. Eventually, I realized that the solution would be to make a .dir-locals.el file in ~/org/orgzly/. Open that file in Emacs, and stick the following in it.

((nil . ((eval . (auto-revert-mode 1)))))

That ensures that any file in that directory will have auto-revert-mode enabled.

Once you have done this, you can add task files or inbox files in ~/org/orgzly to your org-agenda-files variable, and they will show up in your agenda views as usual.

Hopefully these instructions work for you. Please let me know if you can see any improvements or problems with the way I have implemented this. Happy task tracking!

Using WireGuard over xfinitywifi

2024-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

If you are a Comcast Xfinity customer, you hopefully know that you can log into WiFi hotspots wherever other Xfinity customers have them enabled, all using the SSID xfinitywifi. You may have also figured out by now that WireGuard doesn’t seem to work over this WiFi service without additional tweaking.

Well, I have tweaked a WireGuard configuration until it seems to work.

I searched the Web for quite a while to find a good solution, and there seemed to be a general feeling that the MTU needed to be adjusted. Lots of people offered various solutions.

Through some experimentation, I discovered that on the client-side WireGuard configuration, the maximum transmission unit (MTU) needed to be set to 1280. Apparently this is a significant number because it’s the lowest possible MTU for an IPv6 network. Setting the MTU so low will impact performance, but if you are going through a WireGuard VPN, performance probably isn’t your biggest concern.

In the end, your client-side WireGuard configuration, which is located in /etc/wireguard/wg0.conf if you are on Linux, should look like the example below. Note in particular the MTU and AllowedIPs line.

[Interface]
PrivateKey = <your private key>
Address = <your ip address and netmask>
DNS = <your DNS server>
# This MTU line is the important one!
MTU = 1280

[Peer]
PublicKey = <your public key>
PresharedKey = <your pre-shared key>
Endpoint = <your endpoint>:51820
# This is important for client-side routing!
AllowedIPs = 0.0.0.0/0, ::0/0
PersistentKeepalive = 25

This became important to me because I’ve been shifting over to using a secure travel router when I am out and about. The router I chose to go with is the GL.iNet GL-SFT1200 Opal, and it has built-in WireGuard support that you can enable with a switch on the side. It is very cute and effective. This allows me to use WireGuard to create a VPN tunnel back to my home network, which gives me the ability to use my dual pi-hole setup from anywhere in the world!

If you have been struggling with that pesky xfinitywifi network and its weird settings, I hope this helps. It took me too long to find the right solution!

Installing Emacs 29.1 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

2023-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

You have probably heard by now, but Emacs 29.1 has been released! Here are some reasons to upgrade and how to do so right away if you are running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

What’s New with Emacs?

One of the most exciting new features for me is TreeSitter support, which provides incremental parsing capabilities for programming languages and other formatted files. This means that programming support will be getting faster, more comprehensive, and even better in future Emacs packages.

Other new features include native WebP image support, pure GTK support, and the ability to use emacs -x in the first line of a script, which could lead to some fun applications of Emacs Lisp. Read all of the release notes here!

Installing on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

I am too impatient to wait for somebody to release a packaged version, so I installed Emacs 29.1 from source. It is fairly straightforward, though you will need to do a couple of special things to get all of the features you want.

Installing the Requirements

Note: All of the commands in this post assume you are using bash.

Most of the extra libraries and packages you will need to build Emacs 29.1 are covered in the build dependencies for the stock Emacs package. However, to take advantage of some of the cool extra features now included in Emacs, you’ll need to install a few more things.

sudo apt build-dep emacs
sudo apt install libgccjit0 libgccjit-10-dev libjansson4 libjansson-dev \
    gnutls-bin libtree-sitter-dev gcc-10 imagemagick libmagick++-dev \
    libwebp-dev webp libxft-dev libxft2

Preparing to Build

In order to get native compilation (a feature added in Emacs 28) working correctly, you will need to make sure your shell instructs the build system to use gcc-10.

export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-10
export CXX=/usr/bin/gcc-10

Get the Source Code and Let’s Compile!

Download the Emacs 29.1 source code from a nearby GNU mirror and then extract it! Then follow the instructions below. Note that you might want to take a closer look at the options to ./configure. If you want native compilation, but don’t want to use the “ahead of time” option because it’s slow, you can remove the =aot. You might also want to stick Emacs in a different location using the --prefix option. For example, I used --prefix=/opt/emacs29.

cd emacs-29.1
./autogen.sh
./configure --with-native-compilation=aot --with-imagemagick --with-json \
    --with-tree-sitter --with-xft
make -j$(nproc)

The build might take a while. With the “ahead of time” compilation, I think my build took ten or fifteen minutes. But once it is complete, try running your new Emacs binary to make sure it works.

./src/emacs -Q

If it works, install it!

make install

What’s Next

You’ve got Emacs 29.1 installed and running! This is exciting. Which new features do you want to try first?

Get started with tree-sitter!
Run M-x eglot and see how cool language servers can be!
Read about other new features in Emacs 29.1!

I hope this article was helpful, and that you are enjoying the latest version of Emacs! I used it to write this blog post, so you know I am.

Some Great Fish Shell Plugins

2022-09-23T17:44:00+00:00

As a long-time Linux user, I am pretty comfortable with command line interfaces. However, as I started learning more about automation and how important it is to get your computer to do more work for you, I leaned toward wanting my command line shell to do more. Eventually I switched to fish shell, a very user-friendly shell with excellent scripting capabilities that is far more readable and less obscure than bash.

Plugins for fish

There have been a few plugin managers over the years, but the one that seems to be the best maintained and most usable is fisher, created by Jorge Bucaran. It allows you to easily install plugins straight from GitHub repositories, while updates can be executed with a simple fisher update on the command line.

z

One of the greatest command-line time savers ever is the z command. Originally a bash script, it has been ported to fish and, frankly, I love it.

What does it do? z provides shorthand for visiting directories based on a combination of frequency and recency—or "frecency".

If you frequently visit the /opt/calibre directory, a z calib command will allow you to jump straight there.

If you already have fisher installed, just use fisher install jethrokuan/z and start playing around with z.

You can read more about z here.

pisces

Your IDE has been handling your parenthesis for ages. Now your shell can do the same! The pisces plugin has automatic matching symbol management for parenthesis, braces, quotes, and others.

Install it with fisher using the command fisher install laughedelic/pisces and be matching parens in seconds!

plugin-emacs

Automation can help you interact with your editor from your shell. The Emacs plugin for fish was originally written for an unmaintained plugin manager called Oh My Fish. However, I wanted the plugin to work with fisher, so I made my own fork.

How does it work? This plugin adds easy commands like ef and ed that allow you to open files and directories in Emacs quickly.

Install it quickly using the command fisher install pymander/plugin-emacs and read more about it here.

vfish

Emacs users have probably heard of vterm, which is the Emacs package that interacts with libvterm. It is a powerful terminal emulator that runs in an Emacs buffer. I wrote a fish plugin called vfish that simplifies using fish in vterm.

How does it work? Inside a vterm session, this plugin adds fish commands like vf and vd to open files and directories quickly. It mirrors the Emacs plugin.

Install it using the command fisher install pymander/vfish and read more about it here. Note that it will require some code to be added to your Emacs startup file.

apt

For Debian and Ubuntu users, the Oh My Fish apt plugin works seamlessly with fisher.

What does it do? The apt plugin adds a wrapper around the apt and apt-get commands that simplify package management from the command line.

Install this plugin quickly with fisher install oh-my-fish/plugin-apt and then read more about it.

What's your favorite fisher plugin?

I love finding plugins that can help me automate more of my everyday tasks and workflows. What's your favorite fisher plugin?

Leave a comment below and let me know! Be sure to include a link.

How to Increase Your Privacy on the Web

2015-06-12T15:01:30+00:00

This week, I’m going to share a few links about how to lock down your PC to increase your privacy on the Web. There are a number of things that can be done, even if it’s something as small as turning on tracking protection in Firefox. As I’ve written about many times, our privacy has been under attack since before the Internet existed. You are not powerless, regardless of what you may think.

https://twitter.com/runasand/status/606958744396828673

Why Firefox?

If you want to increase your privacy, Firefox is your best bet. The author of Security Spread wrote a thorough analysis, in which he said, “I’m looking at this review from just the security and privacy perspective and I must say that Mozilla’s Firefox is the best. Both when it comes to ‘out of the box’ features and available add-ons.” He’s not the only one. Many security experts, analysts, and amateurs seem to agree that Firefox provides the strongest privacy protection.

Firefox is also available for most mobile devices, as are the extensions I mention below.

Configuring For Privacy

Now that you’ve listened to me and a bunch of other strangers on the Internet, you’ve got Firefox installed. Let’s get started! The first and easiest step is the “Do not track” setting. Go into the Privacy panel of your Preferences and check Tell sites that I do not want to be tracked.

This setting sounds good, but it might not do much. Mozilla says on their website, “Companies are starting to support Do Not Track, but you may not notice any changes initially.” This means that it’s only the nice, polite companies who didn’t realize they were doing something unsavory who are going to stop tracking you.

You should also disable third-party cookies. These are cookies set by a website that can be read by another. For example, Facebook “Like” buttons do this. Sometimes they’re necessary, but you should experiment and see what works for you. You should still be on the Privacy panel, so select “Use custom settings for history” from the History > Firefox will: drop down. Then change Accept third-party cookies to “Never”.

These settings are a good start, but there’s more we can do. To go further, you’ll need some add-ons and plugins.

Privacy-Enhancing Plugins

Remember that you need to try to protect your privacy not only from parties trying to track you via cookies, ads, and websites, but also network providers, corporations, and governments who have access to your raw Internet traffic. The add-ons below attempt to address both of these situations.

HTTPS Everywhere

The Electronic Freedom Foundation provides HTTPS Everywhere. This is an extension that works for Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, so even if you ignored my advice to install Firefox, you should still be able to use this. It does everything it can to try to make an encrypted connection to a website. In Firefox, it provides you with a drop down menu that lets you know how many encrypted and unencrypted connections you’ve made to the current page.

Ghostery

Ghostery is an extension that blocks third-party tracking. It works with Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. Currently, it claims to block 2,019 different trackers, which seems like a lot. It has a nice interface that lets you pick and choose which trackers you will block on each site. For instance, you could allow WordPress analytics to work on this website, or you could universally allow Cedexis Radar for performance reasons.

Adblock Plus

On top of Ghostery, you’ll want to install Adblock Plus. This extension is available for Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and a number of other lesser-known browsers. Addblock Plus can be used to block additional content and trackers that Ghostery might not be catching. However, it takes more configuration. You will want to visit the Addblock filter list to decide what to block.

And Others

There are other add-ons and extensions out there. Here’s a pretty good list. Note that I didn’t cover some of the other staples, like NoScript. This is because I don’t want you to get frustrated by usability issues on the Web and give up on protecting your privacy all together.

Heavy-Duty Privacy: Tor

If you really want privacy, and you’re really serious about it, you’ll want to use Tor. Using it correctly takes some learning, though. I would advise you to read as much as you can, and then ask me questions about it. To get started as fast as possible, you should check out the Tor Browser, which is of course based on Firefox.

That's Just a Start

Unfortunately, you have to remember that most eCommerce websites, advertisers, and governments don’t want you to remain private. You will need to pay attention to what you’re doing online. Be mindful of your activities and remember that anything you release into the wilds of the Internet might be traceable back to you—forever.

"Privacy is not something that I'm merely entitled to, it's an absolute prerequisite." ― Marlon Brando

The featured image is a screenshot of the SSL certificate for rya.nc. RyanC writes about how he created the certificate here.