I recently began to use Emacs as my default text editor for most things, having switched from Sublime Text. Specifically, I’m using the brilliant Spacemacs project, which can best be described as a fairly comprehensive set of sensible defaults and plugins for Emacs with a clever plugin architecture. I used to be a casual VIM user for remote file editing and a Sublime Text user for local editing (with plugins). However, neither of these solutions truly satisfied me. VIM is tricky to get fully working plugins for, and a new set of plugins is needed for every target host. Keeping the VIM plugins in sync is a chore even if effort is dedicated to it. Sublime is also very nice, and has a better plugins story, but some of the capabilities don’t seem to go far enough in my opinion. After hearing many good things about Emacs using Spacemacs, I decided to check it out. ...

• programming
• emacs

My wife and I got back from our honeymoon in Italy a few weeks ago (which you can read about here), and I need to remark on how impressed I am by the performance our iPhones. Both my wife’s iPhone 5S and my iPhone 6 performed spectacularly, taking hundreds of photos for us during our ten days on holiday. I know there’s a lot of marketing hype about how good the iPhone camera is, but this was my first time relying exclusively upon a smartphone camera for pictures of a momentous chapter of my life, and I now buy the hype. The iPhone really punches above its weight class in terms of performance and cost efficiency. Because we were using smartphones, we were also able to rely on Google Photos seamlessly backing up full quality copies of our photos every night, to ensure we didn’t lose any photos while we were trekking around. ...

• photography

This blog post is long overdue; I’ve been a bit preoccupied since getting back to the States, but I wanted to briefly share some of my thoughts from my recent honeymoon in Italy. My wife and I had our long-overdue honeymoon early last month, in gorgeous Italy: Venice, Rome, Florence, and Milan. This was the realization of a dream for us; few countries in the world have the culture, history, art, dining, and exquisite beauty which Italy has. We wanted to really see all the sights and soak up as much as possible, so we decided to tour the major cities aggressively. (Maybe in a future visit we can have the luxury of relaxing in a quiet resort and watching the world pass us by.) ...

• travel
• vacation

The other day, I heard about a new iOS app put out by Microsoft’s experimental app development team (a “Microsoft Garage” project): “Word Flow”. Having been impressed with some previous Microsoft Garage projects, and noticing that the keyboard looked suspiciously familiar, I decided to check it out. Like Swype, Word Flow allows both the classic point-and-tap typing mechanism, and the swiping typing mechanism wherein a user drags their finger continuously between the various letters on the keyboard which constitute a desired word in order to generate it. (However, I feel that Word Flow’s point-and-tap precision is higher than Swype’s was when I last used Swype.) ...

Last weekend I finally decided to take the plunge and update my gaming PC to Windows 10. My wife upgraded, my parents upgraded, and even my grandmother upgraded, so I figured I may as well see what all the rage is about. The initial upgrade seemed to go smoothly, and completed in under an hour. However, immediately after the first system restart (and Windows users know how mandatory restarts can be for applying updates), the Start button stopped working for me. I tried a variety of hacks suggested on the internet, such as forcing reinstalls of the Metro environment, even going so far as to do the “refresh” of my PC. To my dismay, none of these worked. I ended up needing to do a full “restart” of my PC, wiping out my C drive and all installed programs along the way. ...