Author Archives: jcs

The iOS Builtin Flight App

Posted on 2022-06-07 by jcs

This post is a bit specialized—to iOS—by Irreal standards but it’s so useful to those who have an iPhone that I’m going to write about it anyway. I’m not sure if this is new or has been in iOS for … Continue reading →

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Org 9.5.4

Posted on 2022-06-06 by jcs

Yesterday I saw this tweet: Org Mode is a GNU Emacs major mode for keeping notes, authoring documents, computational notebooks, literate programming, maintaining to-do lists, planning projects, and more — in a fast and effective plain text system. #Orgmode 9.5.4, … Continue reading →

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Determining If Emacs Is Running In Terminal Or Gui Mode

Posted on 2022-06-05 by jcs

Even if, like me, you mostly run Emacs in GUI mode, it’s sometimes desirable to invoke a terminal instance. Mostly it doesn’t matter which mode you’re in but there are a few things—font colors, for example—that you may want to … Continue reading →

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Commercial Emacs

Posted on 2022-06-04 by jcs

In a followup to his recent post on Modern Emacs, Bozhidar Batsov has a short offering that talks a little about Commercial Emacs. It’s a fork of GNU Emacs but it’s not the first one. There have been several others, … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Duck Duck Go and Microsoft

Posted on 2022-06-03 by jcs

There’s been a huge number of hot takes—mostly on twitter, of course, but elsewhere as well—about Duck Duck Go (DDG) not blocking Microsoft tracking scripts. The hot takes all treat the matter as a betrayal of DDG’s users and express … Continue reading →

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Making Emacs Modern

Posted on 2022-06-02 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov has a post on one of my favorite hobbyhorses: making Emacs more modern. I’ve written about this several times. See here and here for example. Batsov is not sympathetic either. As Batsov notes, almost all these proposed modernizations … Continue reading →

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A Clueless Journalist on Apple’s Self Repair Program

Posted on 2022-06-01 by jcs

Long time readers know that Irreal doesn’t hold journalists in high regard. Oddly, the worst offenders are journalists on the tech beat. It’s odd because you’d expect them to know the difference between a computer and a composter but they … Continue reading →

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Elisp Cheat Sheet

Posted on 2022-05-31 by jcs

Wow! This post from Mickey is something I had no idea about. In Emacs 28, there’s a builtin cheat sheet for Elisp functions. You call shortdoc-display-group and are presented with a list of categories or “groups”. When you choose a … Continue reading →

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Creative Writing With Emacs

Posted on 2022-05-30 by jcs

If you’ve been around Irreal for a while you know that I love reading about how people are using Emacs for non-engineering/scientific purposes such as creative writing. It’s hardly a surprise that creative writers, for example, find Emacs a superb … Continue reading →

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The EFF Announces the End of Life for HTTPS Everywhere

Posted on 2022-05-29 by jcs

The EFF has announced the end of life for their HTTPS Everywhere program. This might seems like a bad thing but it isn’t. The EFF says that their browser extension is no longer needed because all the major browsers now … Continue reading →

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