Author Archives: jcs

Derek Sivers on Plain Text

Posted on 2022-03-03 by jcs

A recurring theme at Irreal is the virtue of using plain text wherever you can. To my mind, using a proprietary format makes you complicit in the data loss that will inevitably occur sooner or later. Derek Sivers agrees and … Continue reading →

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How To Use Tags

Posted on 2022-03-02 by jcs

In response to my post Renaming Tags, Karl Voit pointed me to his recent post on How To Use Tags. He said that his system could solve many of the problems I experience with using tags. It’s a long post … Continue reading →

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Using Paredit’s Slurp and Barf

Posted on 2022-03-01 by jcs

I’ve been using paredit for 11 or 12 years. I don’t use nearly all its features but I still wouldn’t want to live without it. As I discovered early on, the real secret of paredit is understanding slurp and barf. … Continue reading →

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Podcasts with Elfeed and EMMS

Posted on 2022-02-28 by jcs

Arne Babenhauserheide has an interesting post on how he listens to podcasts in Emacs using Elfeed and EMMS. It’s a perfect workflow: the podcast episodes are collected from RSS and listed with Elfeed and those he wants to listen to … Continue reading →

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Renaming Tags

Posted on 2022-02-27 by jcs

Ravi Sagar has a quick video that shows you how to bulk-rename tags in an Org file. If you don’t use tags in your Org files, this probably seems like something you’d hardly ever want to do. Indeed, even Sabar … Continue reading →

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Scheme as a Prototyping Language

Posted on 2022-02-26 by jcs

The other day I saw a link to this short essay on using Scheme as a prototyping language by Jonathan Sobel. The TL;DR is that Sobel was taking an Algorithms class and was assigned a project to implement the fast … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Taking Up Space With Metadata

Posted on 2022-02-25 by jcs

Note: For some reason WordPress refused to embed Fraga’s tweet so I had to link to the tweet instead. As you all know by now, I prefer a minimalist approach to my editor screen layout. I want as much screen … Continue reading →

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Six Useful Emacs Settings

Posted on 2022-02-24 by jcs

David Wilson over at the System Crafters Channel has a new video up on The 6 Emacs Settings Every User Should Consider. The six settings are Enable remembering recently edited files Enable minibuffer history Enable remembering last place visited in … Continue reading →

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Guess Who Was Responsible for the Missouri SSN Leak

Posted on 2022-02-23 by jcs

Back in October of last year Irreal recounted the hilarious but sad tale of the Missouri governor trying to press charges against the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for discovering, notifying the state, and then reporting on the fact that a state … Continue reading →

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Why Learn Scheme

Posted on 2022-02-22 by jcs

Back when I was learning Scheme, my go to implementation was DrScheme. It had great libraries, an excellent IDE, ran on Windows, Macs, and Linux, and produced good standalone code. Eventually it drifted away from the Scheme specification and was … Continue reading →

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