Monthly Archives: August 2017

Tips for Writing LaTeX documents

Speaking of \(\LaTeX\) —as we were yesterday—Diomidis Spinellis, who’s the Editor and Chief and IEEE Software and who has written hundreds and papers and books in \(\LaTeX\) has a nice set of tips for writing LaTeX documents. He has the … Continue reading

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Finding Unbalanced LaTeX Delimiters in Emacs

Here’s a handy tip from John Cook’s \(\TeX\) Tips Twitter feed (see here): Trying to find an unbalanced delimiter in LaTeX? If you're using Emacs you can run tex-validate-region to narrow down where the problem is. — TeX tips (@TeXtip) … Continue reading

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Lisp Runtime Redefinition

One of the things I love most about programming in Elisp is what I (and others) call interactive programming. You can write a little snippet of code—even as small as an expression—and try it out immediately without having to build … Continue reading

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Magit Rebase Tutorial

Guowei Lv has a very nice two-part tutorial on using Git rebase with Magit. Rebase often seems to cause confusion with n00bs—at least it did with me—so I’m always happy to see more tutorials about it. If you’re a visual … Continue reading

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Counting Words in Some Buffers Only

It is often, but not always, nice to have a running count of the words in a buffer. Most usually, this is convenient for writers or students who need to keep track of word count in a paper or book. … Continue reading

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Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You

As yet another example of why we should always look askance at the government collecting data, I offer the recently revealed debacle of the Swedish government’s loss of control of government and police databases. The databases contain information on almost … Continue reading

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Claude Shannon Redux

Recently, I wrote about the IEEE Spectrum’s article on Claude Shannon by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. If you haven’t already read their article, I urge you to do so. Shannon was a fascinating man and a genius virtually unknown … Continue reading

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The Pass Password Manager

A recurrent theme here at Irreal is that you really need to be using a password manager. Let it generate a long, unique, random key for each site and protect those keys with a secure master password (generated by, say, … Continue reading

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Tuning Your Emacs Configuration for a Fast Load

Gergely Risko has an interesting GitHub repository that explores ways of making your Emacs load time as small as possible. Unless I’m hacking on my configuration, I rarely start Emacs except at boot time so the two or three seconds … Continue reading

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Configuring Notmuch and Offlineimap for Emacs

As most of you are doubtless sick of hearing by now, I’ve settled very happily on mu/mu4e to handle my email from within Emacs. It’s not the only possibility, of course, and many other Emacers prefer using notmuch, which is … Continue reading

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