Tech insights

Dashboard view (left) and detail view (right) tumblesocks-mode allows you to access Tumblr from GNU Emacs. Best part is - it has pagewise navigation by default instead of endless scroll. Use c for new post, f for follow, l for like and r for reblog. Since the repository is dormant and I needed some customization, I created a fork . It includes some UI changes, fix for emoji display, shorter tumblesocks alias and fix for displaying post at point, like post, reblog post, goto page etc.  

  Modern emojis are composable - you can compose multiple emojis into a new one. Most commonly, this is done using Zero-Width Joiner or ZWJ character (#200D). Though not all combinations are valid. The valid combinations are defined by the font. e.g. you can combine as follows: Person + rocket = Astronaut Person + manual wheelchair = Person on wheelchair Following function will help you insert ZWJ in between selected text. (defun emoji-compose ()   "Compose emoji from components."   (interactive)   (unless (region-active-p)     (error "Select a sequence of emoji components"))   (let* ((start (1+ (region-beginning)))      (len (- (region-end) start)))     (goto-char start)     (dotimes (i len)       (insert #x200D)       (forward-char)))) For auto-completion, you can use company-emoji . References Unicode defined ZWJ sequences Unicode ZWJ specification ...

  Generate comics strip from a script in GNU Emacs. First, create a folder containing artwork. You can use samples from [2]. It should have three subfolders - faces, poses and backgrounds. Images can be GIF, JPG or PNG. Filenames for face and poses follow a convention: <id>-<emotion>.<ext> . Please ensure you have atleast one file for neutral emotion . Set appropriate values for following variables: comics-artwork - Folder containing artwork comics-col-max - Maximum no. of columns (default: 2) comics-emotions - Alist of emotions and words used to describe them comics-avatars - A list of cons cells (FACE-ID . BODY-ID) Open a file containing the script (sample below) and run M-x comics. This will generate an SVG image for the comics strip which will fit the display window. Panels are rendered with fixed font-size so that it is always readable. Actors are assigned an avatar from comics-avatars sequentially as they appear in the script. Normally, all the actors are d...

  twittering-mode allows you to access Twitter from GNU Emacs. If you have curl installed on your system, it mostly works out of the box except for images. Use u for new tweet, RET for reply, and C-c C-m or C-c RET for retweet. For images, you need to follow these instructions . It basically defines a new format string %I for images in (twittering-generate-format-table).  ("I" .        (let* ((entities (cdr (assq 'entity ,status-sym)))               text)          (mapc (lambda (url-info)                  (setq text (or (cdr (assq 'media-url url-info)) "")))                (cdr (assq 'media entities)))          (if (string-equal "" text)    ...