Tech insights

Ever wondered - what if multimedia editing were as simple as text manipulation? Simple cut, copy and paste operations. Thanks to VLC and FFMPEG, now you can use GNU Emacs for simple multimedia editing tasks. Code: https://gitlab.com/atamariya/emacs/-/blob/dev/src/xwidget.c https://gitlab.com/atamariya/emacs/-/blob/dev/lisp/xwidget.el https://gitlab.com/atamariya/emacs/-/blob/dev/lisp/media.el Concepts - Number denotes a file and an amount of time defined by a scale. e.g. if the scale is 10 seconds, digit 1 denotes 10s clip from file number 1. Corresponding file name is displayed in the dashboard. - Red coloured digit represents a fraction of scale time. e.g. if scale is 10s, it might represent 0-10 s clip. - Number denotes the start time of the clip. - Dot denotes a blank clip for an amount of time defined by a scale. - Whitespace is only a visual separator. - In the viewer window, use o for opening a file, e for exporting, SPC for toggling play, and RET for splitting the clip. - In th...

It should come as no surprise that websites are snooping on its users. However what baffled me was that the browsers ( Mozilla Firefox, webkit and probably others) have joined their team. If your browser supports the navigator.sendBeacon() API, you should dump it right away (or atleast find a blocking mechanism).   API description from Firefox website     In the above screenshots, you can see the API in action for Webkit. Firefox doesn't even log these requests in developer console. The sad part - it's not easy to turn it off. For Firefox, you have to use some extension and hope it does what it advertises. This bug report says they don't even want to change the default. Even for Webkit which is supposedly just a rendering engine the way to turn it off is convoluted. You need to add a user script in the C code. Then in the user script JS, you need to override the function as below: navigator.sendBeacon = function(a){};   In comparison, look at this other API fo...

Now you can use GNU Emacs as a full featured browser. It uses webkit2gtk for rendering. Here's a short video demonstrating the features. Hit-a-hint Developer tools Features: - Adblock - Disabled tracking API (navigator.sendBeacon()) - Inline videos à la Youtube - Hit-a-Hint - Keyboard based navigation: left/right character for left/right scroll, prev/next line, prev/next page, beginning/end of buffer for top/end of page, +/-/z for zoom in/out/reset - Multi-input modes: single key interactive mode, line input mode via minibuffer and textarea input mode via new buffer - Password auto-fill and management via authinfo - Configurable Home page and search URL - Bookmarks - Download unsupported mime types - User script à la Tampermonkey / Greasemonkey - User styles - Developer tools / Web Inspector Finally you can have a browser as you want. Code: https://gitlab.com/atamariya/emacs/-/blob/dev/src/xwidget.c https://gitlab.com/atamariya/emacs/-/blob/dev/lisp/xwidget.el https://gitlab.com/a...

Hit-a-hint was originally developed as a plugin for Firefox. The plugin highlights the links on a webpage with an accelerator hint key. You can simply type the hint to visit the URL. How is this useful? If you notice, the hint consists of permutation of keys on the home row in the keyboard. So your link selection is typically limited to smaller number of keys which are repeated instead of all the keys if you were to select by the anchor text. This idea is implemented as a plugin for all the major browsers. For Emacs, you can use emacs-webkit . Have you tried browsing web using a keyboard? If you haven't yet, I suggest you give it a try.