One of the classic Unix idioms is to search all files in a file hierarchy for some regular expression with a find/grep pipeline. For example, to search the lisp directory and all of its subdirectories for file containing the mapcar function, one could use

find ~/lisp -name "*.lisp" -exec grep -H mapcar {} \;

That pipeline finds every .lisp file in the hierarchy and runs grep on it looking for mapcar.

I, at least, don’t do this type of thing very much anymore because there are so many easier ways of doing so, especially from within Emacs.

Nonetheless, it’s still possible to usefully combine find and grep from within Emacs to build a Dired buffer of all the files that contain the matching regex. This tweet by
Mickey tells you how:

You can combine the utils `grep’ with `find’ in #emacs with:

M-x find-grep-dired

Pick a directory and a pattern and you’ll get a dired listing of the matching files.

You can use the dired listing like you would any other dired buffer.

— Mickey Petersen (@mickeynp) January 19, 2022

There’s a bit more to the command so you should take a look at the on-line documentation if you have a use for it.

The incomparable Mickey has a few words to say on Bad Emacs Advice. Mickey and I have been using Emacs for approximately the same amount of time and although we are both still learning, we agree that there’s some well meaning but bad advice about learning Emacs. Mickey identifies the four hot sports for bad advice:

1. Turn off the menu and tool bars
2. Ignore the Emacs manual
3. Don’t bother with the tutorial
4. Don’t use the Custom Interface

In a nice example of serendipity, I learned a couple of new things from Mickey’s post on Emacs advice. The first is that you can access the menu system from the keyboard with Meta+`. that’s probably not useful for any but the most hardcore antimouse GUI user but it’s very useful if you’re using Emacs in terminal mode.

The second revelation is that can find out what a menu item does in exactly the same you find out what a key combination does: Simply precede the menu mouse click with Ctrl+h k.

Mickey’s advice strikes me as sound. Whether or not you use the menu bar when you gain a bit of experience, it’s undoubtedly true that it can be a big help in learning Emacs. Some say the same about the tool bar but I’ve never found it useful: it’s ugly, doesn’t help you learn the shortcuts, and doesn’t have any functionality that the menu bar doesn’t. As for the manual and tutorial, advice to ignore them seems particularly ill advised to me. Why wouldn’t you want to avail yourself of comprehensive documentation on the workings of Emacs?

As for the Customize Interface, I used it a lot in my early Emacs days but don’t use it at all now except for those automatic package things that Emacs insists on inserting into the Custom Configuration and even then I exile it to custom.el so it doesn’t pollute my init.el.

I agree with Mickey about his take on bad Emacs advice. Take a look at his post to see what you think.

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The great Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin was assigned to make a documentary about his hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba. He made MY WINNIPEG (2007), a hilarious, surreal dreamscape that combines autobiography, history, and fiction into a free-flowing meditation on a city and a home. We discuss the film's treatment of truth, memory, and the Canadian identity. PLUS: Luke discusses the glamorous life of being a published book author.

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

Preorder Luke's book The Dead Center- https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/the-dead-center/

"Manitoba History - February 19, 1942: If Day" by Michael Newman - http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/mb_history/13/ifday.shtml

Guy Maddin's "The Heart of the World" - https://vimeo.com/115997353

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Enlarge / All those supports require a lot of aluminum. (credit: Longhua Liao)

Once solar panels are operative, they produce electricity without carbon emissions. But making and installing them involves some emissions. Most of the worries about solar panel production have focused on the elements that go into the panels themselves, like gallium, cadmium, germanium, indium, selenium, and tellurium. But according to new research, the massive amount of aluminum needed to house the solar rigs of the future could create further problems.

“I hadn’t realized just how much aluminum was required for the frames and the modules, mountings, and inverters,” Alison Lennon, a researcher at UNSW Sydney’s School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering, told Ars. She added that aluminum is often used because it is lightweight and corrosion-resistant.

In 2020, the World Bank released an oft-cited analysis called "Minerals for Climate Action: The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition.” In this report, the authors identified aluminum as one of the minerals that would need to have its production scale by a large amount for the world to meet its climate goals. “PV was a large contributor,” Lennon said. “[This] made me think about the problem a bit more.”

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

But now the CIA has admitted that "Havana Syndrome" is not caused by attacks by a foreign hostile power, but rather stress or natural causes.

Benjamin Norton interviews Doctor Robert Bartholomew, a medical sociologist and leading expert on mass hysteria and social panics, explains how he predicted this in his 2020 book "Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria."

VIDEO: youtube.com/watch?v=LnpaqWVi76U

Robert Bartholomew's website: rebartholomew.com

Krystal and Saagar discuss the stock market drop taking place, Biden's response to tensions in Ukraine, insider trading in Congress, a court ordering workers to keep their jobs, Jen Psaki's advice, World Economic Forum proposals, Mark Cuban, FBI's targeting of an animal rights activist, and more!

To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/

To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and Spotify

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Matt Johnson’s Work: https://www.directactioneverywhere.com/ 

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Wilfred Hughes’ Emacs Command of the Day Twitter feed has a useful tip:

Have you ever created a great keyboard macro, but wanted to add a few more keystrokes at the end?

`C-u F3` will run the keyboard macro, and start recording any additional keystrokes until you press F4!https://t.co/aa9aBz3zn0

— Ⓔ Command of the Day (@ecotd) January 16, 2022

I’ve seen this before and may even have written about it before but I always forget about it. I’m not sure why; it could hardly be simpler: just prefix the start macro command with the universal argument.

In any event, it’s a useful reminder for me and may be for you too.

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Havana Syndrome proves a bust and Eric Adams praises fruit. We spend the main chunk of the ep reviewing Frank Luntz and the New York Times’ recent focus group of the most chaotic and bird-brained type of person in existence: the average American independent voter.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the system that flourished from 1870 when gold became dominant and more widely available, following gold rushes in California and Australia. Banknotes could be exchanged for gold at central banks, the coins in circulation could be gold (as with the sovereign in the image above, initially worth £1), gold could be freely imported and exported, and many national currencies around the world were tied to gold and so to each other. The idea began in Britain, where sterling was seen as good as gold, and when other countries rushed to the Gold Standard the confidence in their currencies grew, and world trade took off and, for a century, gold was seen as a vital component of the world economy, supporting stability and confidence. The system came with constraints on government ability to respond to economic crises, though, and has been blamed for deepening and prolonging the Great Depression of the 1930s.

With

Catherine Schenk Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Oxford

Helen Paul Lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton

And

Matthias Morys Senior Lecturer in Economic History at the University of York

Produced by Eliane Glaser and Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the empire that flourished in the Late Bronze Age in what is now Turkey, and which, like others at that time, mysteriously collapsed. For the next three thousand years these people of the Land of Hatti, as they called themselves, were known only by small references to their Iron Age descendants in the Old Testament and by unexplained remains in their former territory. Discoveries in their capital of Hattusa just over a century ago brought them back to prominence, including cuneiform tablets such as one (pictured above) which relates to an agreement with their rivals, the Egyptians. This agreement has since become popularly known as the Treaty of Kadesh and described as the oldest recorded peace treaty that survives to this day, said to have followed a great chariot battle with Egypt in 1274 BC near the Orontes River in northern Syria.

With

Claudia Glatz Professor of Archaeology at the University of Glasgow

Ilgi Gercek Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and History at Bilkent University

And

Christoph Bachhuber Lecturer in Archaeology at St John’s College, University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Occasionally I need to figure out which Debian package some file comes from (e.g. because I want to remove a redundant package or find related packages). There are a couple of ways to do this in Debian, with the simplest being the following:

$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/ag
silversearcher-ag: /usr/bin/ag
$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/gcc
gcc: /usr/bin/gcc

dpkg is a built-in command, so it’s always around. -S stands for --search:

-S, --search filename-search-pattern...
Search for a filename from installed packages.

Note, that it’s best to use absolute paths if you want to get a concrete package as the result. Observe the difference here:

$ dpkg -S /bin/ls
coreutils: /bin/ls
$ dpkg -S bin/ls
kmod: /sbin/lsmod
pciutils: /usr/bin/lspci
util-linux: /bin/lsblk
util-linux: /usr/bin/lsns
usbutils: /usr/bin/lsusb
e2fsprogs: /usr/bin/lsattr
util-linux: /usr/bin/lsmem
util-linux: /usr/bin/lslogins
initramfs-tools-core: /usr/bin/lsinitramfs
util-linux: /usr/bin/lsipc
kmod: /bin/lsmod
util-linux: /usr/bin/lslocks
gnupg-utils: /usr/bin/lspgpot
lsof: /usr/bin/lsof
coreutils: /bin/ls
util-linux: /usr/bin/lscpu
klibc-utils: /usr/lib/klibc/bin/ls
lshw: /usr/bin/lshw
lsb-release: /usr/bin/lsb_release

Here you can stop reading, as 99% of the time that’s probably the best option for you. Still, there’s one more way to approach the problem, namely by using apt-file. You’ll need to install apt-file and initialize its database first:

$ sudo apt install apt-file
$ sudo apt-file update

Using apt-file is quite simple:

$ apt-file search /usr/bin/gcc
gcc: /usr/bin/gcc
gcc: /usr/bin/gcc-ar
gcc: /usr/bin/gcc-nm
gcc: /usr/bin/gcc-ranlib
gcc-10: /usr/bin/gcc-10
gcc-10: /usr/bin/gcc-ar-10
gcc-10: /usr/bin/gcc-nm-10
gcc-10: /usr/bin/gcc-ranlib-10
gcc-7: /usr/bin/gcc-7
gcc-7: /usr/bin/gcc-ar-7
gcc-7: /usr/bin/gcc-nm-7
gcc-7: /usr/bin/gcc-ranlib-7
gcc-8: /usr/bin/gcc-8
gcc-8: /usr/bin/gcc-ar-8
gcc-8: /usr/bin/gcc-nm-8
gcc-8: /usr/bin/gcc-ranlib-8
gcc-9: /usr/bin/gcc-9
gcc-9: /usr/bin/gcc-ar-9
gcc-9: /usr/bin/gcc-nm-9
gcc-9: /usr/bin/gcc-ranlib-9
gcc-opt: /usr/bin/gcc-3.3
gcc-opt: /usr/bin/gcc-3.4
gcc-opt: /usr/bin/gcc-4.0
gcc-python3-dbg-plugin: /usr/bin/gcc-with-python3_dbg
gcc-python3-plugin: /usr/bin/gcc-with-python3
gccbrig: /usr/bin/gccbrig
gccbrig-10: /usr/bin/gccbrig-10
gccbrig-7: /usr/bin/gccbrig-7
gccbrig-8: /usr/bin/gccbrig-8
gccbrig-9: /usr/bin/gccbrig-9
gccgo: /usr/bin/gccgo
gccgo-10: /usr/bin/gccgo-10
gccgo-7: /usr/bin/gccgo-7
gccgo-8: /usr/bin/gccgo-8
gccgo-9: /usr/bin/gccgo-9
pentium-builder: /usr/bin/gcc
xutils-dev: /usr/bin/gccmakedep

As you can see by default it provides all possible matches from its database. One advantage that apt-file has over dpkg is that it will search through all available packages as opposed to all installed packages. That might be handy sometimes when you know you need to have some file installed, but you don’t know which package contains it. Admittedly, I didn’t know about apt-file until very recently myself, which is part of the reason I’ve decided to put together this short article.¹

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!

Andy Zaltzman and the News Quiz satirise the week's news from the UK and beyond.

This week Andy is joined by Alice Fraser, Chris McCausland, Daliso Chaponda and Hugo Rifkind. They try to make sense of a week of big dogs, pork pies and red meat.

Chair's Script: Written by Andy Zaltzman Additional Material: Written by Heidi Regan, Cameron Loxdale, Stephen Buchanan and Tasha Dhanraj. Production Coordinator: Katie Baum Sound Editor: Marc Willcox Producer: James Robinson

A BBC Studios Production

Democracy Now! 2022-01-19 Wednesday

• Headlines for January 19, 2022
• Judge Approves Puerto Rico Debt Restructuring, But Unelected "Junta" Could Remain for Years Longer
• Scholars Angela Davis, Gina Dent & Beth Richie on Why the World Needs "Abolition. Feminism. Now."
• Angela Davis on Reissue of Her 1974 Autobiography, Her Editor Toni Morrison, Internationalism & More

Download this show

Geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar discusses the violent coup attempt in Kazakhstan, and its crucial importance as an ally of Russia and the center of China's Belt and Road Initiative. He also addresses US, British, and Turkish meddling, and why this massive and misunderstood country is suddenly at the heart of the new cold war.

PART 1 OF 2

Pepe Escobar discusses the failure of the US-Russia talks in Geneva, NATO's refusal to make any diplomatic concessions, and if war could be on the horizon. We address the impact on Ukraine, Europe, Germany, and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

PART 2 OF 2

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So I (Chris) take one week off producing for a little vacation and somehow the boys manage to accidentally record all three of themselves into just one mic track for this ep? Idk I literally can’t leave these jokers alone for one minute. Our guest editor did heroic work getting this listenable, but sorry for the “chapo classic” audio quality.

Anyway, the boys are back in town and California dreamin' on such a winter's day, they discuss whether MLK's civil rights rings are legit or Mickey Mouse, ongoing COVID hysteria, demand parents leave twitter for Facebook, how shitty it is to be a kid these days, and finally Felix debuts his idea for an adult Six Flags Great Adventure.

Chapo Trap House’s Amber A’Lee Frost and Jacobin contributor Danny Bessner investigate whether the Democrats are losing on purpose. Ross Barkan discusses New York mayor Eric Adams’s unlikely coalition of black working-class voters and wealthy developers, and Jen Pan debunks blue-state racecraft. The Jacobin Show offers socialist perspectives on class and capitalism in the twenty-first century, the failures of liberalism, and the prospects of rebuilding a left labor movement in the US. This is the podcast version of the show from January 12, 2021 with Jen Pan hosting.

Subscribe to Jacobin: https://jacobinmag.com/subscribe/?code=JACOBINYT

Music provided by Zonkey: https://linktr.ee/zonkey

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Franco Pasut has posted on exporting variables from Org to LaTeX. The TL;DR is that you can define LaTeX macros defining a variable value in #+LATEX_HEADER: entries at the top of the Org file and then interpolate the variables in the text by including \variable_name{} in the body of the document. That’s nice because it makes it easy to change the value of those variables, if needed, in one place and have the results reflected in the whole document.

The problem with this method is that it’s not portable. It’s great if you’re only exporting to PDF but if you want to also export to HTML, say, it won’t work. The proper way of handling the general case is to define the variables at the Org level as described by Mike Hamrick in his excellent video Consistent Technical Documents Using Emacs and Org Mode that I wrote about wrote about previously.

In either case, the idea of defining variables in one place and using their values throughout the document makes a lot sense precisely because it makes it easy to change those values when needed without scanning the entire document. Take a look Hamrick’s video to see how powerful the method can be.