Filtering org-agenda to *exclude* a category
Back in July, I explained how I use Beorg to sync my calendars. To recap, Beorg continuously exports the iOS calendar into a read-only org file, which I then sync to my Mac’s desktop through iCloud.
The calendar.org file shows on my Emacs agenda, where I can see both my Outlook (work-related) meetings and my Gmail (personal) events. This is very nice, but because the calendar.org file is read-only (as it should be—it keeps being overwritten by the Beorg every time the iOS calendar syncs), I can’t use it for anything besides this visual information.
If I want to create a project from a meeting and add notes and sub-tasks, I have to copy the event from my calendar.org file to Now.org, where I keep my current projects and tasks. There, I can add notes and headers.
But then there’s another problem: when I copy my headers over to Now.org, my agenda shows duplicates - one event header comes from calendar.org, and the other comes from Now.org after I copied it there. Here’s what it looks like:
When I start my day, it’s important that I see calendar.org so I can copy over details to now.org. Once I’m done, however (clearing the Calendar tag, adding a keyword like MEETING, and cleaning the text under the header from details I don’t need), I no longer need to see calendar.org, and I want it to disappear.
I was looking around for a solution to this problem, and of course, it was right under my nose. Org-agenda comes with the option of narrowing down (filtering) the agenda to a category at the point with <. What I didn’t know is that C-u < does exactly what I want: the opposite of the above. It hides the category selected. Problem solved.
Pan's Labyrinth, 2006 - ★★★★½
This is the third or the fourth time I watched this movie. It's the first movie by Guillermo del Toro I've seen, and it's masterpiece.
A fairy tale fit for grownups, you won' find a happy ending here (well, kind of, depending on your angle) - it's full of magic and symbolism. There's not much to say about this movie that won't spoil the magic of watching it for the first time, so I won't attempt to do so. Go watch it.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! 🦃😁
Not a lot going on at work today, so I decided to borrow one of our old Windows machines and set it up as a remote workstation. Installed all the Office updates, synced Edge, RSAT, PowersShell 7.1, other good stuff. Now to document everything… But first, a nap. 😴
Now I really want to play this game. Want to wait for them to patch it first, I’m hearing it has too many bugs.
Christmas brain washing needs to stop.
I can’t block stores from blasting Christmas music into my ears or prevent game studios from updating a game with a patch that forces me to watch a Christmas-related intro clip.
I don’t even celebrate it. It’s not December yet. What happened to TG. Go away 😡
The flow of followers on Bluesky doesn’t stop. It’s about to double from the start of the week. Just wish I knew how to turn off now follower notifications on my Android.
greatly reduce video file sizes
For my personal journal videos (which I call jvids for short), the quality is not important since it’s just me talking. I could just get rid of the video, but it doesn’t feel as “real.”
A 10-minute HD video recording on an iPhone can take close to a gig. This method compresses the videos to around 50MB MP4 files, even more if I want to. I use the iPhone directly or as a Continuity Camera with my Mac and Photobooth, but you can use a webcam or whatever other means you’d like.
Run ffmpeg like so1:
ffmpeg -i input.mov -filter:v scale=640:-1 -crf 30 -c:a copy .\output.mp4
Where:
-filter:v: we’re telling FFMPEG the next option is going to be a video filter
scale=640:1: the video filter - this tells FFMPEG to give me the width of 640 pixels, and it will figure out the right ratio for height. This greatly helps reducing the size, but noticeably lowering the quality. For my own talking head, this is fine.
-CRF 30: this is the compression ffmpeg uses, from 0 to 51. The default (if you don’t specify CRF) is 20 for the default codec. I want to shrink it a bit further, so I go for 30.
-c:a copy as for the audio codec, no compression and no conversion, use as is, make a copy
Gotcha:
1 Notice that 640, while being a nice resolution, doesn’t work well for videos recorded on phones. To quickly get something that works, divide the width by 2 and use that number; it will still reduce it greatly.
Big city lights 📷
This spot is calling my name 📷
