Where Are The Wise Men?

Why Org's agenda ignores your start day

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I feel like a bad Emacs user because, while I've been using it for a long time, it's only been in the past few months that I have embraced Orgmode as my task manager. Sometime I will probably write about my journey to this point, but for now I want …

How Emacs Uses Nix

Mike Hostetler — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

It's been a while since I wrote for the Emacs Blog Carnival but I have missed it. I decided to dip my toes back in when I saw July 2026's theme - Programming.

I started thinking about how my Emacs configuration for development isn't that special and then I realized that …

Hyperlegible Fonts

Mike Hostetler — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I've always been a bit picky about fonts in books, the web, programming, etc. I want something that is easy to read and tell characters apart. While some developers choose fonts that are very light so they can get more characters in a line or screen, I go with readability …

More Map Utilities

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

A few weeks back I wrote about Maps and how MapUtils.isEmpty from Apache Commons Collections made the null-checks go away with isEmpty. Since then, I've been poking around the rest of MapUtils and it turns out the isEmpty method is not the only goodie hidden in there. MapUtils also …

Modern Java Maps

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I'm back doing Java stuff for a while, and a lot of our codebase uses Maps a lot. Though it's a new project, the codebase leans heavily on the style of Java 7/8 and not with the new patterns that came with Java 9 and above. Here are some …

My Emacs Misconceptions

Mike Hostetler — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0600

This is my Emacs Carnival post this month on Mistakes and Misconceptions.

Just in the past year, I realized something surprising: I no longer have vi muscle memory. I was a dedicated vi user for fifteen years before I switched to Emacs, and at some point it just… left. I …

Readeck: More Than a Read-It-Later App

Mike Hostetler — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600

In my last post I mentioned I switched to Readeck as my read-it-later app. It's starting to become essential to my workflow. The first thing that struck me was how fast it feels. My old Wallabag instance was sluggish when saving an article. Readeck saves asynchronously: you tell it to …

Pikapod Apps

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I realized that my article from last fall on self-hosting on the NAS is now outdated. Not only am I not hosting apps on my NAS anymore, but I'm not even using those apps anymore. I started using Pikapod to host my RSS and read-it-later apps. Pikapod hosts a lot …

Emacs Carnival: Completion

Mike Hostetler — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600

This is part of the February 2026 Emacs Blog Carnival on Completion

For me, completion is a odd thing to have as a carnival theme mostly because I just "do completion" and don't think about it. I really had to do a lot of thinking just to figure out what …

Getting Down with Git Town

Mike Hostetler — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I like Git a lot and I know how to use it fairly well.. I wouldn't consider myself an ultimate expert – more like an intermediate user that has found themselves in weird situations with Git and, most of the time, figuring out how to get out of them

My main …

Emacs Maintenance

Mike Hostetler — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0500

This is to join in on October 2025's Emacs Blog Carnval: Maintenance

This is an ironic subject for me, because my Emacs config is full of stuff – and some of it I use. I do a lot of experimentation and trying out new packages. Some of them are "oh this …

Emacs Obscure Package: transient

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0500

This is my entry to the Emacs Carnvial - Obscure Packages.

It's funny to say that Transient is an obscure package not just because it's now bundled in Emacs, but also because one of the killer apps in Emacs – Magit – uses it. But how many people make their own Transient menus …

Using Dataclass as a constructor

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0500

This article from Glyph talks about not using the __init__ dunder function to initialize a class and instead use the dataclass in the standard library. I read his post and experimented with this new way to make a constructor and decided that I totally agreed – this was a much cleaner …

Lotus Agenda: modern ideas from an old app

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0500

A couple of weeks ago I read a long article about Lotus Agenda. I had heard of Agenda before – I had read man times that it was a much beloved niche product that was way ahead of it's time. You can read this particular article yourself – I'm not going to …

Emacs Works For You

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0500

This is my submission for the August Emacs Carnival – the Emacs Elevator Pitch.

My pitch is simple, but then it takes a little while to explain:

Emacs works for you, you won't work for Emacs.

Overall I think the heart of my pitch reflects on my own personal belief about …

Self-hosting on a NAS

Mike Hostetler — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0500

The shutdown of Pocket (that I didn't hadn't used in a long while) got me into self-hosting my RSS Reader and my Read-It Later systems. When I bought my Synology NAS a few years ago, I unknowingly bought a model that has an ARM processor, which does not support Docker …

From Obsidian to Emacs

Mike Hostetler — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0500

This is to join in on this month's Emacs Blog Carnival: The Writing Experience.

The "Writing Experience" is a timely theme because I recently changed from using Obsidian for my note habit to Emacs. I'm not going into a long list of reasons why but it all comes down to …

Emacs: Take 2

Mike Hostetler — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0500

This is part of the Emacs: Carnival: Take Two challenge.

This may be hard to believe, but when I first exposed to Emacs, I dismissed it almost immediately. I was taking a Unix class while at in the university and the horrible professor was an Emacs fan. He tried to …

Small Emacs Tweaks

Mike Hostetler — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

Some Emacs tweaks that have made a big difference in my workflow

Treating a SQLAlchemy query like a table

Mike Hostetler — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0600

Setting up a complicated query to be a SQLAlchemy object

git worktrees

Mike Hostetler — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0600

How I use git-worktrees

The Emacs Hyperbole

Mike Hostetler — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0500

How I discovered Hyperbole and what it is to me

Discovering CookieCutter

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 11:00:00 -0500

How I setup projects now, using CookieCutter

LYT Solution Log

Mike Hostetler — Mon, 20 Jun 2022 11:00:00 -0500

Talk about how I integrate Linking Your Thinking into my knowledge base/solution log

How I use Nix

Mike Hostetler — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0500

This is how I use Nix for my day to day work

My Weekly Prep and Review

Mike Hostetler — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0600

This is what I do to review last week and to prep for the next

State of the Apps 2021

Mike Hostetler — Sat, 11 Dec 2021 10:20:00 -0600

Apps that I use and why, 2021 edition

Why do I Write This?

Mike Hostetler — Sun, 26 Sep 2021 00:00:00 -0500

A little while ago I ran into someone and we ended up chatting about this blog. He asked an interesting question – "Why do you write the blog?". I didn't have an answer then and I'm not sure that I have one now, but I'm writing about it anyway.

A day …

Emacs as your RestClient

Mike Hostetler — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 00:00:00 -0500

A few weeks ago, I was surprised when I was asked to demo a webservice that I wrote. Since I didn't prep a Postman config for it (because I don't use Postman unless I have to, like during demos ) I got out Emacs and opened the orgfile that I had …

Advancing my Todoist

Mike Hostetler — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 00:00:00 -0500

My previous post about my bullet journal got me thinking of rapid logging, and got me thinking about how projects in Todoist aren't just working for me – and suddenly I found myself in another Todo App Crisis.

I have a friend that that shares the productivity bug with me and …

Handwritten Notes

Mike Hostetler — Sat, 15 May 2021 00:00:00 -0500

If 2020 was the Year of Taking Notes, then 2021 is turning into the year of handwriting notes. And if you know me this is quite a change – I have been proudly typing things out for years, leaving writing things by hand proudly behind. A big part of it …

New House

Mike Hostetler — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0500

The idea of the new house started when we moved into the old one. It was a concept, an idea that we joked about. "Well in our next house we want… "" and then we would chuckle. I mean there were things that we didn’t like and so we changed …

Puzzling

Mike Hostetler — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0600

It was a long time ago when I first discovered Sudoku. I do remember it well… I had a long flight ahead of me and this was before I had a smart phone..I had some books (like printed) but wanted something else in case the books made me lose …

Working the cloud with rclone

Mike Hostetler — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 00:00:00 -0600

TL;DR – rclone truly is the Swiss Army knife of cloud storage and you should look into it if you have to deal with that world at all (S3, DropBox, OneDrive, etc).

In the past I really had an addiction to Humble Bundle, where I bought a lot of cheap …

Video Games as Art

Mike Hostetler — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 00:00:00 -0600

Been thinking a lot lately of the current state of video games.. I'm not sure why. Technically, we own an XBox One but my son plays on it mostly (or, er, most of the time) and I've dabbled a bit in other games, specifically Minecraft and Stardew Valley, which in …

Streaming TV Shows -- COVID edition

Mike Hostetler — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 -0600

As this crazy year closes, my wife and I were chuckling about how many TV Series we binged while in isolation. We started more than we finished – if one us is isn't totally into it, we have no problems in stopping. These are the ones we liked the best. This …

Webfaction to Netlify

Mike Hostetler — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 -0600

It was funny – the day after I finally put up a blog post I got an email from Webfaction that my account was closed. That was funny. I mean I knew they were migrating sites and I had a couple of old Django playgrounds on there, plus my person blog …

2020 -- The Year of Taking Notes

Mike Hostetler — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:00:00 -0600

Hey it's December and it's my second blog of 2020. Almost a year since my last update. Let's not talk about the strange year of 2020… sometimes I do an unintentional Big Thing(tm) for me, learning-wise or tech-wise of the year. A few weeks ago I figured out what …

My Uses This

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0600

This year I've discovered the blog Uses This and I'm fascinated by it. Since I will never be on there, I decided to roll my own. As I started thinking about it, I realized that I kinda have something like it, at least describing my current development environment so maybe …

New Tools for an Improved Workflow

Mike Hostetler — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 00:00:00 -0500

Kasim Tuman recently wrote that Emacs is like a workbench. It evolves as you get better with your work – or changes as your works changes. I think that is a great metaphor of not just Emacs, but software development tools in general. So this post is about my evolving workbench …

Literate Dotfiles

Mike Hostetler — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 00:00:00 -0500

For several months, I've been converting a few of my dotfiles into OrgMode files and using tangling to generate the config file and the same file generates HTML documentation. The point was to always publish them – and I finally have. See the HTML version or the github project. Note that …

On Music

Mike Hostetler — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 00:00:00 -0500

It's funny as I have hit solidly middle age, when you figure things about yourself that have always been there – but you have just noted it. I can list quite a few things – both positive and negative. But what the one I have just simply noticed is music.

This should …

Review "Relay"

Mike Hostetler — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0600

I'm not sure how many other people remember Nextel but I do, maybe because my first job out of college used them a lot. They had one really cool feature on their phones – a walkit-talkie like functionality. You could hold a button and talk, and people on your list of …

RSS Reader

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 00:00:00 -0500

I've gotten back to blogs again. And that meant I needed an RSS Reader. The qualifications:

web-based but have an Android app
interface gets out of my way to read an article
favorite support
syncs often
still under active development
ability to pay a reasonable price for the service (because …

A Wii Bit of History

Mike Hostetler — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 00:00:00 -0500

In an odd series of events, we played our Wii again for the first time in years. We had a lot of fun bowling and my son discovered how hard Wii golf can really be, but then he cleaned us up on the tennis court. He was a baby in …

The Year of Emacs

Mike Hostetler — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 00:00:00 -0500

Somehow, by accident, 2018 has become the year of Emacs. I did write about some Emacs improvements I was doing, but it seems to be something I have come back to time after time. My latest work project is a large, mostly-standard Java app with some Spring sprinkled in here …

Misc Bits and Bobs

Mike Hostetler — Wed, 16 May 2018 00:00:00 -0500

Lots of little ideas in my head that don't seem to make up a good post for each one, so I'm putting them into on. Be prepared for utter chaos.

I read about a compact microtool on the Cool Tools blog and I had misplaced my (larger) Leatherman I carried …

Quick Editor Thoughts

Mike Hostetler — Mon, 07 May 2018 00:00:00 -0500

Some things on editing I found this weekend:

EDITOR vs VISUAL . I didn't know there was a difference between the environment variables EDITOR and VISUAL and I always set the former. But I was way wrong. There seems little point in setting EDITOR unless you still work inside serial connections …

Adventures in Homebrewing

Mike Hostetler — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 -0500

https://i.imgur.com/Sh7r8I4.jpg

I started brewing beer over a year ago and, for some reason, I haven't blogged about it. Which is funny, since beer and homebrewing have become popular keywords for my web searches over the past year. And, yes, that pic above is one of …

Setting up an RetroPie

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 00:00:00 -0500

I've failed to blog about one of my more geeky things I've done in the past year – setup a RetroPie. Note that it's not Retro/Pi/ because you can install it on more things than a RasberryPi… though that is exactly what I did.

For the 2016-17 school year, my …

Review "Mastering Emacs"

Mike Hostetler — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 -0500

I've been trying to improve my emacs-fu for the past while. It was probably 18 months ago I declared bankruptcy on my duct-tape and bailing wire Emacs config and started fresh with Projectile and haven't regretted it for a second. I started reading the Emacs Reddit, which introduced me to …

Confessions of an Online Paranoid

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 00:00:00 -0600

I spend a lot of my day online. Searching for solutions for projects, restaurants, advice, etc. Online forums, restaurant review sites, and many other places … my browser history is big every day. Sometimes I get a little disturbed by how often my searches show up in ads showing to me …

Notes During a Fast from Facebook

Mike Hostetler — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 00:00:00 -0600

As I write this I'm in the middle of a break from Facebook. At this point, there is little reason for me to ever get back.

First – I'm not sure it's public knowledge that there is a way to simply disable your account on FB. You sorta disappear…. people can't …

May 2017 Media Diet

Mike Hostetler — Wed, 17 May 2017 00:00:00 -0500

I think it's cool when Jason Kottke does it so why not do it too?

Guardians of the Galaxy (the first one) – My daughter was recently sick on a Sunday and we watched this together. It was my third time and her first. It really holds up well. Still my …

Managing a Mountain of Music

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0500

A few months ago I was going through various backups and online file storage places I have (and they seem legion) and noted that I had music files everywhere. Some dated back to my late days of college (just before Napster was a thing) up to much more recent downloads …

New Printer

Mike Hostetler — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0600

We had to get a new printer this week. I was able to get it to talk and print from not one, not two, but three different devices in my house on the first try. Either printing is getting better or easier, or the anti-printing coalition forces aren't working against …

My New Android Tablet

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0600

Over the years I've had a lot of cheap Android tablets. I started with a Hisense Sero Pro 7, which was actually a good tablet until it decided to stop charging. I then started using my daughter's old (and no longer used by her Nexus 7), which also stopped charging …

Changes

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 00:00:00 -0600

I wanted to do some changes around here and then got caught. I wanted to blog more but I didn't want to support any of the old blog. So i ripped the band-aid off, grabbed very few recent posts and then left 12 years of blog posts over there.

So …

Bad Phone is good

Mike Hostetler — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 18:17:00 -0600

My Android phone has been weird lately and in the midst of troubleshooting it, I did a factory reset to figure out if that would fix it (it didn't). After the reset I installed very few apps because I wanted to narrow it down. Now that I have done that …

Brew story

Mike Hostetler — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 13:46:00 -0600

My wife got my a little beginner home-brew kit for a late Christmas present. I was delighted and started the fermentation process that night.

As week later, I took a small sample from the fermenter and was excited by the result after such a short time. I gave a little …

Best Feature of the Nest Thermostat

Mike Hostetler — Sun, 15 Jan 2017 17:44:00 -0600

Our favorite feature of the Nest Thermostat is the lock feature. We found out about this feature after kids starting turning up our thermostat. One time up to 81 ℉! The nicest thing is what we can still adjust it on our phone without unlocking it.

Interactive Fiction

Mike Hostetler — Wed, 11 Jan 2017 09:59:00 -0600

Once every few years I end up looking at Interactive Fiction and am surprised that it's live and well. People are making games like Zork for the fun of it. What a fun little niche that I'm glad is still going on.

Oh and if you have never played inkle's …

Safari Books

Mike Hostetler — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 14:42:00 -0600

My fantastic employer let me put Safari Books towards my (ample) education/training budget last year. Just last night I remembered that I hadn't used it in a while so I fired it up and undid some books that were in my queue that I didn't need anymore. Then I …

Star Realms Challenge

Mike Hostetler — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 20:43:00 -0600

Shaun Austin often runs solo challenges for Star Realms, which is one of my favorite games. The challenge for this month is especially good. Or I was really in the mood for a great game, which I got when I played it. I'm anxious to give it another go very …