This is the site of Joar Alexander Pablo von Arndt. I write about a variety of topics, from coverage of GNU Emacs web browsing, to graphic design and critiques of industrial policy. You can subscribe here.
My own personal favorites are the following:
Making Beautiful Documents in LaTeX
As a political science student, writing is a daily activity. And like any serious writer who cares about their writing, I care about the presentation and look of my documents. This has evolved, particularly recently, into an interest in typography — the art of formatting and shaping text. The source of this interest was originally my discovery of GNU Emacs’ ability to convert org-mode documents into \(\LaTeX\) ones back in high–school and even today this is still the basis of my process. It was accelerated by my increasing tinkering with this very website, having to design its appearance largely from the ground up.
Continue ReadingOn Text
Text, as a system of recording symbolic representation for communication across time and space, is likely one of the most important inventions of mankind — second only the the symbolic representations themselves made possible by language. The general text, opposed to the specific form of writing, is useful primarily because it is a survivable and storable form of information that above anything else functions as lossy compression. These qualities make working with text more powerful than most other human inventions.
Continue ReadingA Beginner Guide to Diplomacy
I am hosting a new game of the board game Diplomacy, as usually hosted on Backstabbr, for students of the bachelor’s programs at SEDU. Since there are new players I have written this short introduction to the rules for them as a starting-off-point into how to play diplomacy.
Continue ReadingHandwritten notes in Emacs using Xournal++
My girlfriend recently bought a Framework 12 laptop1 with a correspoding stylus and, influenced by my ravings about the power of GNU Emacs, wants to take handwritten digital notes on it for her engineering and mathematics classes and then organise them in org-mode. I see a younger version of myself clearly in her, and of course want to help her attain the vision she has for her own Emacs system. At the same time I am a strong believer in that you should not try and learn Emacs, but that it should be molded to your own personal desires. For that reason I try to act in merely an advisory capacity, while helping whenever she asks.
Continue ReadingProductive Note-taking
After initially starting to use Emacs back in high school merely for programming, I naturally began to use it for other tasks such as document preparation and note-taking. This introduced me to the surprisingly large overlap between Emacs users and people generally interested in “productivity” workflows.
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