You can view the information that various websites — like Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn, to name a few — have about you by submitting a data request. A corporate data request is a curiously asymmetrical notion: These companies don’t request your information, they just take it (sometimes even if you don’t use their services), yet you have to request your own information from them. It’s a bit like if you have a stalker who’s been shadowing you around, meticulously documenting everywhere you go, everyone you talk to, and everything you do, who’s now handing you a form to fill out if you want to see the boxes of files they’ve been keeping on you. I decided to request my data from Amazon, which courteously affords me the opportunity to join the ranks of the numerous third parties that can also get my data from Amazon.

The Roach Motel

The first thing I learned is that Amazon is in no hurry to give you your data, nor does it really encourage you to ask for it in the first place. I couldn’t even figure out how to navigate to the request page without turning to a search engine. In fact, Amazon seems keen to discourage data requests, as making one is a labyrinthine endurance test of being bounced from one webpage to the next, waiting for weeks, and then downloading, extracting, and combing through dozens of files. Requesting your data from Amazon is an exhausting procession that feels a little bit like a text adventure game designed by Franz Kafka.

Once you’ve actually made it to the preliminary “Request Your Personal Information” page, Amazon suggests that you can also access “a lot of your personal information in Your Account.” This is the first iteration of a refrain that you will run into multiple times throughout the protracted data request process, repeated every step of the way.

Amazon’s “Request My Data” selection menu.

Screenshot: The Intercept

After you click on “Request My Data,” you’re taken to a page with a drop-down menu where you can “select the data that you want,” with the option “Request All Your Data” in the 16th position, at the very bottom of the menu. And in case you’ve forgotten that you can also see some of your data in your account settings, Amazon offers a helpful reminder: “Don’t forget you can access a lot of your data instantly, as well as update your personal information, from Your Account.”

Once you submit your request, you’re taken to the “Data Request Creation” page, which thanks you and informs you that “You’re almost done…” but now need to click a verification link in your email. Amazon at this point makes some intonations about how this email verification step is necessary because your privacy and security are the company’s top priority, though considering that when your data is available you’ll need to check your email anyway, it’s not clear how checking your email twice adds any security. And by the way, in case you’ve forgotten already, Amazon also reminds you on this page that “You can access a lot of your data instantly, as well as update your personal information, from Your Account.”

Amazon’s “Data Request Creation” message.

Screenshot: The Intercept

At this point, you’ll need to pop over to your email and click the “Confirm Data Request” link. Doing so will take you to the “Data Request Confirmation” page, which informs you that Amazon has “received and [is] processing your request to access your personal data.” This feels a little strange, as you don’t recall ever making Amazon jump through this many hoops when it wanted to access your data. (This page again reminds you that you can get “a lot of your data … from Your Account.”)

The “Data Request Confirmation” page also informs you that you may be in for a bit of a wait. Though Amazon says that it will “provide your information to you as soon as we can,” “soon” is apparently meant to be interpreted on a monthly time scale, as the page further states that “usually, this should not take more than a month.” Though of course, “in exceptional cases, for example if a request is more complex or if we are processing a high volume of requests, it might take longer.” This protracted time frame forms an intriguing juxtaposition to the otherwise universal emphasis on speed that facilitates shopping on Amazon. “If you have to click multiple buttons, if you have to wait for too long, if you have to answer a lot of information — all of those things create friction, and friction exponentially kills the joy of shopping,” Nadia Shouraboura, a former member Amazon’s management board, said in the 2014 CNBC documentary “Amazon Rising.”

Amazon’s “Data Request Confirmation” message.

Screenshot: The Intercept

Given Amazon’s obsession with speed and eliminating friction to foster faster consumerism, the dawdling data solicitation process seems like it just might be intentional, designed to dissuade requests. A far simpler explanation comes through an invocation of Hanlon’s razor, the old adage to “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Amazon whistleblowers cited by Politico have said that the company “has a poor grasp of what data it has, where it is stored and who has access to it.” If that’s the case, then it stands to reason that it can take a month or more for Amazon to process a data request. As former Amazon chief information security officer Gary Gagnon succinctly put it in an interview with Reveal, “we have no fucking idea where our data is.”

Asked whether the company takes a long time to fulfill data requests because it doesn’t have a good grasp on where customer data is kept, Amazon spokesperson Jen Bemisderfer said the company “strongly reject[s] the assertion that we don’t keep track of customer data. Producing [customer data] reports requires that we know where data is stored. Amazon maintains multiple and complementary tools and processes to systematically identify where personal data is stored and how it flows.”

Bemisderfer did not directly address a question about whether Amazon intentionally makes the data request process difficult, instead writing, “We are committed to providing customers with access to their information and are always looking for ways to improve the customer experience.”

It ultimately took about 19 days for Amazon to fulfill my data request, in stark contrast to its reported median time of 1.5 days to process a data request, as per the company’s California Consumer Privacy Act disclosure for 2020. There was no option for expedited Amazon Prime data delivery and no button equivalent to an instantaneous Buy Now (née 1-Click) option when selecting my data. When the data was finally ready, Amazon sent me an email expressing outright jubilation at the fact that it had managed to find my information, stating: “We are happy to confirm that we have completed your data request.” And since it’d been a few weeks, Amazon also understandably thought that I could use another reminder that I could “find all the available information” related to my Amazon profile (“including reviews”) on my profile page.

Amazon’s “Your personal data is ready to download” email.

Screenshot: The Intercept

Clicking the link to download the data in the arrival email in turn took me to the “Download your Amazon Data” page, which once again (for the sixth and, mercifully, final time) helpfully reminded me that “You can access a lot of your data instantly, as well as update your personal information, from Your Account.”

On the data download page, under the veneer of endless consumer choice, I was presented with a total of 74 separate zip files that had to be downloaded individually (though enterprising users have built scripts to help automate the process). This turn toward extreme granularity is doubtlessly not unappreciated by the ever-discerning consumer who, despite explicitly requesting all of their data from the drop-down menu earlier in the request process, may nonetheless now only wish to download the cryptic Advertising.1.zip and Advertising.3.zip but may studiously want to avoid Advertising.2.zip, and is therefore thankful to be spared the burden of being saddled with two additional kilobytes of extraneous data.

The Amazon data download page that Nikita Mazurov received.

Screenshot: The Intercept

Amazon is here employing a kind of reverse dark pattern: Instead of irksome layout gimmicks designed to trick users into inadvertently doing things (like subscribing to mailing lists), Amazon is using an irksome layout pattern to discourage you from downloading all of your data. Specifically, this is kind of a “roach motel” model reminiscent of when Yahoo presented users with more than 300 buttons to individually press to opt out of third-party data collection from its partners. Except in Amazon’s case, you have to go through this process to merely view your data, not opt out of it.

“You Can Access a Lot of Your Data”

Once you’ve gone through and painstakingly downloaded all of the zip files, you need to extract the contents of each one either using a program included with your operating system or (if you can’t find one already on your computer) a free tool like 7-Zip. The extracted data is predominantly in the form of CSV files, which can be opened in a spreadsheet editor like Calc, included with the free office productivity suite LibreOffice. (Microsoft Excel will work too.)

While Amazon’s reminders that you can access “a lot” of your data by looking around your account and profile settings is doubtlessly true (given that “a lot” is a nebulous quantifier), what becomes apparent when looking over your requested Amazon data is that the company collects a lot of information that you cannot view in those settings.

In skimming over this trove, one thing became very clear right away: Amazon sure seems to love to retain information. Though the company states that it is legally required to keep certain data like order history, other information like search keywords seems to be retained at Amazon’s discretion. The company intricately logs chat and email interactions you’ve had with buyers, sellers, and Amazon; your cart history; your orders, returns, and reviews; and your searches (for the past three-and-a-half years), or at least those made while logged into your account. The spreadsheet that lists your search history (Retail.Search-Data.Retail.Customer.Engagement.csv in Retail.Search-Data.zip) contains 65 fields with information like search terms, your IP address, how many search results you clicked on, how many search results you added to your basket, and how many search results you ended up buying. The file also includes fields with unclear titles. For instance, one column marked “Shopping Refinement” sporadically lists cryptic strings of numbers like “26,444,740,832,600,000” for various search queries.

Aside from keeping a meticulous ledger of all your site activity, Amazon also takes the liberty of holding on to data you may have had the mistaken impression you deleted. If you click “Remove” on any address you have stored in the “Your Addresses” portion of your Amazon account, this in fact only removes the address from that page, not from Amazon’s records. Addresses that you have removed from your account are merely labeled as “Is Address Active: No” in Retail.Addresses.pdf (within Retail.Addresses.zip). On its “Add and Manage Addresses” customer service page, Amazon makes no mention of the fact that deleted addresses are only deleted from being visible to you on your account page and are not actually deleted from Amazon’s servers. Given that account recovery security questions for various services can be along the lines of “What’s the name of the first street you lived on?” or the fact that people sometimes use their old house or apartment numbers as their PINs, gaining access to a user’s comprehensive list of old addresses can be particularly advantageous for someone who has access to your Amazon account and wants to expand their reach.

Amazon’s advertising data on you is inexplicably divided across three zip files. Advertising.3PAudiences.csv (in Advertising.1.zip) lists “Audiences in which you are included via 3rd Parties.” It’s not explained how Amazon acquires this third-party audience data, but according to this dataset I apparently am a homeowner, in possession of a luxury sedan and SUV, and in the 45 to 54 age range. This was all news to me, as I am none of those things. It genuinely feels good to know that Amazon is wasting resources on harvesting inaccurate audience demographic information from third parties.

The two Advertising.AdvertiserAudiences.csv files (in Advertising.1.zip and Advetising.2.zip), meanwhile, list “Advertisers who brought audiences in which you are included.” It’s not clear what this field actually means — for instance, if “brought” is a typo for “bought” — but at any rate, my data is apparently somehow linked to a total of 167 advertisers, including Carrington College, Clever Cutter, Fitbit, HCA Healthcare, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and something called Animal Friends. Three Canadian banks — Bank of Montreal, Royal Bank of Canada, and Scotiabank — are disproportionately represented in this list of advertisers that have hoovered up my data; I don’t know why, though I did several times order gifts to Canada.

There are also zip files dedicated to other Amazon services like Alexa, Amazon Games, Amazon Music, Kindle, and Prime Video. I don’t make use of those, so mine were empty, though it does at this point come as no surprise that Amazon keeps track of, for example, how long you watch individual Prime Video offerings and which country you are in when viewing them, or which books you read on your Kindle, down to which pages you look at.

Overall, from my Amazon data request I learned that I never did find a good “DIY plasma ball kit” or a decent “summer watermelon recipes” book, but I am decidedly happy that Amazon thinks I’m a 45 to 54-year-old luxury sedan-driving homeowner and that multiple Canadian banks have a competing interest in me.

Minimizing Data Exposure

There are numerous steps one could take to minimize the amount of information Amazon is able to collect. You could be sure that you’re using ad-blocking software like uBlock Origin to reduce the chance of advertisers tracking your browsing habits and buying or selling that information. You can also peruse Amazon through the private mode in your browser, or at least while being logged out of your Amazon account. And if you don’t want Amazon to have your IP address, home address, phone number, and credit card information, you could always use a virtual private network for browsing, a Post Office box for shipping, a temporary burner phone number for account verification, and a temporary or virtual credit card number. It may also not be an entirely bad idea to periodically start fresh, via Amazon’s ever-helpful “Request the Closure of Your Account and the Deletion of Your Personal Information” page.

The post I Want You Back: Getting My Personal Data From Amazon Was Weeks of Confusion and Tedium appeared first on The Intercept.

Minor Automation to Facilitate End of Week Reporting

At Forem, one of my responsibilities is writing up an end of week status report for the projects assigned to my team. Sometimes I delegate that responsibility (if there’s someone with more information for the week’s update).

I’ve found that I enjoy writing these reports. I spend about thirty minutes per project writing up the report. During that time I gather what’ve we done, what we’re planning to do next week, and write up any risks to the project.

Earlier this week, Allison, our head of engineering, provided an adjusted template to help facilitate writing consistent reports for tracking issues.

I figured I’d go ahead and automate Emacs 📖 to help me use that template.

Forem End of Week Status Update

The following emacs-lisp creates a buffer, from an existing template, to help kick off writing my end of week status reports.

(defvar jf/forem-eow-template
  "~/git/forem-internal-eng/.github/epic-progress-update.md"
  "The location of the template to use for end of week reporting.")

(cl-defun jf/forem-prepare-end-of-week-status-update (&key (template jf/forem-eow-template))
  "Create a buffer for writing up an Engineering End of Week Status Update.

TODO: Consider pulling down the latest version of that template."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((body (with-temp-buffer
		 (insert-file-contents template)
		 (buffer-string)))
	 (eow-buffer (get-buffer-create "*Forem EoW Update*")))
    (switch-to-buffer eow-buffer)
    (erase-buffer)
    (markdown-mode)
    (hammerspoon-edit-minor-mode)
    (insert body)
    (beginning-of-buffer)
    (kill-line)
    (insert (concat "## " (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d")))))

Details

The above code:

• copies the contents of the template
• creates a new buffer titled *Forem EoW Update*
• sets it as Markdown type content
• enables Hammerspoon (see below)
• pastes the contents into the new buffer
• sets the first line to today’s date

I use Hammerspoon and the editWithEmacs.spoon to help me use Emacs for editing Emacs text areas. I wrote about that in Send Anything in OS X to Emacs for Editing. .

Conclusion

This little bit of automation ensures that I’m using the consistent template and am writing using my favorite computer tool. It’s a quick bit of automation, but one that I need to leverage at least once a week for the foreseeable future.

The dramatic conclusion of our Rise of the Unblooded saga. Our heroes infiltrate the Alabaster Palace, confront the Mad King, and unveil the truth of their bloodlines.

Guided by DM Patches (@senator_gun)

Written by DM Patches & Jack Walden (@meanunclejack)

Series art by Artyom Trakhanov (@vor_bokor)

Democracy Now! 2022-03-25 Friday

• Headlines for March 25, 2022
• Yanis Varoufakis: The West Is "Playing with Fire" If It Pushes Regime Change in Nuclear-Armed Russia
• Start of a New Cold War? U.S. Hawks "Want to Jack up the Military Budget and Use Ukraine as an Excuse”
• Meet Francia Márquez, the Afro-Colombian Land Defender Running to Be Colombia's First Black VP

Download this show

Democracy Now! 2022-03-22 Tuesday

• Headlines for March 22, 2022
• Ketanji Brown Jackson Vows to Uphold Equal Justice Under Law at Historic SCOTUS Confirmation Hearing
• "Absolute Hellscape": Human Rights Watch Decries Russian Bombing & Siege of Mariupol
• Ukrainian Pacifist in Kyiv: All Sides Have Fueled the War. Only Comprehensive Peace Talks Can End It

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Democracy Now! 2022-03-21 Monday

• Headlines for March 21, 2022
• "Russia & China, Together at Last": Historian Al McCoy Predicts Ukraine War to Birth New World Order
• "U.S. Hypocrisy on Ukraine": Biden Admin Remains Silent on Morocco's Occupation of Western Sahara
• Exclusive: Sahrawi Activist Sultana Khaya Speaks from Moroccan-Imposed House Arrest in Western Sahara

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Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):

March 3, 2022 Anatol Lieven on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine • Alyssa Giachino and Derek Seidman, among the authors of this report, on private equity and fossil fuels

She's a Democrat. He's a Republican. They're speechwriters on warring campaigns... But can they fall in love??? That's the premise of the Michael Keaton/Geena Davis romcom SPEECHLESS (1994), which drew inspiration from the real-life romance between Clinton strategist James Carville and Bush advisor Mary Matalin. We discuss a movie that could only have been made in the '90s.

"John Cleese Had Thoughts on Slavery at SXSW and It Was Super Cringey" by James Hibberd - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/john-cleese-sxsw-panel-1235109668/

"Bedfellows Make Strange Politics" by Gore Vidal - https://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/18/books/bedfellows-make-strange-politics.html

Michael and Us is a podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage.

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We cap off this season of This is Sus with a show both host and guest actually enjoyed. Felix is joined by his brother Sam to discuss the gay soap sitcom Queer As Folk (2000).

Part 3 of our fantasy adventure series in the world of Dungeons & Dragons. The boys make their way through the Black City, and on to the Alabaster Palace in the Capital.

Guided by DM Patches (@senator_gun)

Written by DM Patches & Jack Walden (@meanunclejack)

Series art by Artyom Trakhanov (@vor_bokor)

You might have heard of org-mode headers IDs. By default, these are Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs). In this post, I want to talk about what they are, why I use them (and you should, too), and how to make them into slugs - human-readable IDs that make sense. This will be a bit of a long explanation of what I discovered in org-mode, so buckle up..!

What are UUIDs and why Should I Care?

The org-mode manual doesn’t exactly point at header IDs unless you know where to look. Because of this, a casual user of org-mode might overlook these powerful organizational tools.

Referencing to a header as itself in a link in org-mode, such as myorfile.org/myproject/subproject-task is risky because we refile headers all the time. The org-mode workflow is built on moving headers around: from capture templates to a generic project to journal entry, these move from their original files and parent headers on a regular basis. This means that any links using a path like the one above will break¹.

For this reason, we have header IDs. They require that we include org-id in our init (as part of org-mode’s modules), and then we can generate them for any header by calling org-id-get-create: “create an ID for the current entry and return it. If the entry already has an ID, just return it.”

By default, org-id-get-create creates a string of random numbers and letters: our UUID. Now, every time we want to reference the header, we link to the UUID instead of the header’s path, like so: [[id:our UUID here][description here]].

This is great, but the problem with these UUIDs is that they are a string of random characters that make no sense to us. There’s no way a header with an ID like 05576976-a33c-11ec-9da6-020017000b7b tells us anything. We will return to this problem in a bit, because first I want to discuss another great (and perhaps overlooked) org-mode feature that makes this even more problematic.

Referencing to files with Org-Attach

Org-mode comes with a built-in attachment mechanism called org-attach. You can summon it with C-c C-a when inside or-mode under a header. Org-attach was one of the features I always knew existed but never used, and I suspect the reason for that is the same for many others.

The problem is that we already have a system to navigate and organize our files ingrained deep into our mind, be it Finder, Windows Explorer, or whatever GUI version is on your Linux distro. For us dedicated Emacs users, there’s of course the excellent Dired, which blows them all out of the water.

What’s more though, org-attach is using some seemingly weird system to store our files deep in folders that don’t make sense to us, and the only way to find them later is to use org-attach again to summon these attachments. At least, that’s what I thought.

Assuming you haven’t tweaked around with your org IDs, org-attach will nest an attachment under three folders. First, the default “data” folder, which is where all the attachments are stored. Second, under it, a folder with the first two characters of the header’s UUID. Then, third, a folder with the rest of that UUID as its name.

This is a bit confusing, so let’s break it down a bit. Again, the following workflow assumes you don’t have any settings affecting org-attach. Launch Emacs -q if you have any doubts:

1. Go visit an org file, and navigate to one of its headers.
2. Summon org-attach with C-c C-a. This will bring up a menu. For now, just use the first option, a.
3. Next, org-attach will ask you which file you want to attach. Navigate to one and select it. Don’t' worry, this will create a copy; the original will stay where it is.
4. Standing on the header you just worked with, which should now have an :ATTACH: tag, summon org-attach again, but this time call option F, which will open the directory the file is in with Dired.

What you’re going to see is that you’re inside your org file’s folder, inside a data folder, and then inside a weird two-letter folder, and then inside a long string of the rest of the UUID. Something like this: /home/user/orgfiles/data/ab/f4b2cf-4b38-45ec-9333-346b42861d24.

With this default org-attach behavior in place, no wonder you’d prefer to use other methods to store your files. That’s too bad because you’re missing out on org-mode’s excellent ability to organize your projects with their files attached right to them.

This is a huge miss. Think of all the data you can organize this way if you could only make these folders make sense. Well… You guessed it. you can. It just needs a bit of tweaking.

From Org-IDs to Timestamp Slugs

By now, you can probably see where I’m going with this (and if not, you’ve guessed from the sub-title). timestamp org-mode header IDs.

The idea is simple: change how these IDs are created in org-mode by modifying org-id-method. By default, its value is a UUID, which was explained previously. We can change it to ts²: (setq org-id-method 'ts). That’s it. The next time we’ll create an ID using org-id-get-create, it will produce something like 20220315T083403.413614. Still a bit confusing to read, but much better than UUIDs! year, month, date, followed by T for time, and then the current time down to the fraction of the second. I believe it’s broken down to these tiny time fragments to reassure a unique ID.

This will set up our unique IDs as timestamp³, but we still need to configure org-attach to use it. Because org-mode is set up to use UUIDs by default, org-attach is set to create directories that are meant to work with UUID. The functions that create directories for org-attach are defined in another function, org-attach-id-to-path-function-list. Specifically, it points to two functions: org-attach-id-uuid-folder-format and org-attach-id-ts-folder-format. You can go into org-attach.el and see that they break down the folder structure in a pretty straightforward way: the UUID function (which is the one used by default) takes the first two characters of the UUID and makes a parent folder out of those (as seen above), while the ts function takes the first six. The first six characters make sense because they include the year and the month.

By default, if we use the above example of 20220315T083403.413614 as a timestamp, we will get the following directory structure: /home/user/orgfiles/data/20/220315T083403.413614. Not very useful: you will need to keep using org-mode until the year 2100 for a new sub-folder to be created! This is exactly what happened to me, and it required some head-scratching and diving into org-attach to figure out. I tried to mess around with the functions in org-attach directly, but that didn’t go well until someone on IRC pointed me at what I missed: what needs to be changed is org-attach-id-to-path-function-list. It is as simple as changing the order of the functions on this list, so org-attach will know to use the function first.

Together with org-id-method, which we defined above, we can write the whole thing like so:

(setq org-id-method 'ts)
(setq org-attach-id-to-path-function-list
'(org-attach-id-ts-folder-format
org-attach-id-uuid-folder-format))

Now when you use org-attach, it will use the ts function and create the following directory (to use the example above): /home/user/orgfiles/data/202203/15T083403.413614. This makes much more sense. You could also build your own function that would look like org-attach-id-ts-folder-format, but perhaps using the first 4 characters, to create a parent directory for the year only. You will just need to make sure your custom function shows up first in org-attach-id-to-path-function-list.

A few Extra Things

I mentioned I used an excellent package called org-super-links. In a nutshell, this package automates creating org-IDs, linking them to an org-header, and creating a backlink from that header to the one linking from it. You should read Karl’s post about it and how he uses it to get a better idea than what I’m letting on here if you haven’t yet. As a matter of fact, if you want to get some more background, read the previous post mentioned above and you’ll see I’ve been trying to change org-IDs into timestamp slugs for a while. So much so, in fact, that I wrote my own function to do that for me until I discovered org has a system built-in already. As it goes with Emacs though, there’s no wrong answer. The previous attempt took me deeper into elisp, which was a fun learning experience in itself.

With org-super-links, the process above is quicker, since I don’t need to bother with org-id-get-create. I just search for the header I want to link to, and everything’s created automatically: an ID for the header I’m on, an ID for the header I’m linking to, a link linking to that ID at my marker, and a backlink at the header I am linking to pointing back to the header I’m on. You’d probably need to read that last one again. The bottom line is that if you’re serious about header IDs, you should probably take a look at that wonderful package.

Another post that’s been floating around since 2016 by Matthew Lee Hinman approaches org-mode IDs from a different angle, that of publishing to HTML. In the post, Hinman explains that if you use IDs in your org-file, you will also benefit when you export it to an HTML file: the header links you will use will link where you need them to go, and that’s even after you moved headers around.

I’m actually using HTML more and more at work when I want to explore my org-mode files into KB articles that go into wikis. This is especially helpful with you include a table of contents: the headers the TOC will connect to will not break if you use IDs. This is maybe a bit more of a niche use, but having a TOC in a how-to article makes a lot of sense, and org-mode creates one for you automatically because it’s amazing like that. I don’t understand why will anyone want to use something like Word and transfer these docx files over to a wiki by copy-pasting and seeing all the spaces and broken bullet lists and…. ugh. OK OK, Emacs is not exactly something your coworkers all know about. But with something like what I just described above, doesn’t it make you feel sorry for them sometimes?

Footnotes

1. As a matter of fact, I think breaking links to headers and losing information is one of the reasons for org-roam’s popularity. Of course, the new versions come up with a lot more than just linking notes across a huge database, but at its core, this is why people started adopting it. ↩︎

2. Emacs documentation specify a third method, org: “Org’s own internal method, using an encoding of the current time to microsecond accuracy, and optionally the current domain of the computer. See the variable ‘org-id-include-domain’.” This generates what seems to be a random string of text that is also not human-friendly. I’m not sure about the computer’s domain part, but this might be interesting for folks who have several computers on a domain using emacs. ↩︎

3. giving headers unique IDs as timestamps is useful also because it leaves “clues” to help locate lost information later. For example, when you create a project with this unique ID, and later on you forgot what it was, you can use the date to clue you in. It gives you another layer of search on your agenda (“202203” for example) to show all the projects created in March, provided you create an ID for each project, which you totally should. Because this is a simple text string, you can also use this outside of Emacs with other scripts to automate tasks that will look for this ID. It opens a world of options now that you have a range of unique IDs that you understand in your head, AKA, slugs. Also, it just looks better. ↩︎

Last time I mentioned that I helped making it possible for Eglot to use jdtls, the Python helper script packaged with Eclipse JDT to start the language server with sane defaults. The only problem I had during my work on this is that jdtls requires Python 3.9 or later, why my Ubuntu 20.04 machine comes with the 3.8.10 version. Since changing the default Python on Ubuntu can bring pain¹, I decided to have Emacs work with Python 3.9 only for my Java projects.

First, I installed the required Python packages:

$ sudo apt install python3.9 python3-9-venv

Then, in my Java project root directory I ran:

$ python3.9 -m venv env

Finally, I had to tell Emacs how to interact with this new Python environment. In the root directory of my project I added a .dir-locals.el file with the following content:

((nil . ((buffer-env-command . ">&2 . \"$0\" && env -0")
         (buffer-env-script-name . "env/bin/activate")
         (python-shell-virtualenv-root . "./env"))))

I am using Augusto Stoffel’s buffer-env to pick up the activate script and run it automatically for me. Checking the Python version with M-! /usr/bin/env python3 -V RET told me I was doing the right thing. Keep in mind that you don’t have to set buffer-env-command like I do. Here I am setting it back to its default value because I changed it in my init.el to specifically deal with direnv. Anyway, with everything in place Eglot correctly interfaced with jdtls for a smooth Java developing experience.

A note to myself: I will probably need to revisit this setup as soon as I move to the new Ubuntu LTS which, I guess, will provide a more recent Python by default.

Notes

How could I not know about this? It’s been in Emacs since Emacs 19.31 so it’s been around for at least 26 years. In case you, too, aren’t familiar with it, Bhaskar Chowdhury has a video that explains and demonstrates it.

The TL;DR is that Webjump allows you to call your default browser and jump to any of several preconfigured Web sites directly from Emacs. Webjump comes with several sites already defined but you can, of course, add your own or otherwise edit the list. You can even specify a function to build a site’s URL for complicated situations. See the National Weather Service entry in the default list for an example of this.

I get similar functionality with bookmark+. I’ve been using it for years since I read about it on abo-abo’s blog. It allows you to set a bookmark for any Website you like. I use it to quickly open the Irreal site all the time. Of course, bookmark+ is a separate package while Webjump is built in.

If you already have bookmark+ installed and don’t need complex processing, like the National Weather Service example, I’d just stick with that. It’s quick and easy and doesn’t involve a menu. If your needs are more complex or you don’t want to install another package, Webjump is flexible and simple to use.

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David Edgerton joins Long Reads for a discussion about the making of the modern British nation. David is a professor at King’s College London, where his work concentrates on twentieth-century history, global science, and technology. His most recent work is The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, one of the most ambitious reinterpretations of modern Britain for many years.

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