Author Archives: jcs

Are Google Searches Losing Quality?

Posted on 2022-01-03 by jcs

As most of you know, I try to avoid Google as much as possible. In particular, I haven’t used the Google search engine in years. But that’s because of privacy concerns and Google’s sordid record of vacuuming up as much … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Germany Gets It Right

Posted on 2022-01-02 by jcs

Tutanota is a Germany-based secure email provider. As you would expect, they are very interested in privacy-affecting legislation, especially in Germany, so they were quick to announce a change in government policy regarding data retention on their blog. The TL;DR … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Draft 4 Revisited

Posted on 2022-01-01 by jcs

It’s New Years day and a lot of you are probably in no mind for an over stimulating rant on one of Irreal’s hobby horses or perhaps even a technical discussion so, instead, I offer a reprise of one of … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Emacs 28, Menus, and Mice

Posted on 2021-12-31 by jcs

Philip Kaludercic has an interesting post on the new Emacs 28 context menu feature. It has some useful information on how to use and configure the feature. The TL;DR is that you can configure menus to be context sensitive. For … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Finite Automata State Diagrams With Tikz

Posted on 2021-12-30 by jcs

I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite implementation techniques is finite state machines. I started using them for communication protocol implementations but soon discovered that they could be applied to several sorts of problems. It’s easy enough to sketch … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Nice Example of Emacs Keyboard Macros

Posted on 2021-12-29 by jcs

Just a quickie today. Bill over at ATMakers has a short video on Why He Uses Emacs. It’s actually a nice example of using keyboard macros to convert raw data into the required form. I like it because it’s a … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Emacs Markdown Mode

Posted on 2021-12-28 by jcs

Timothy Unkert is an Emacs user but prefers to use Markdown over Org-mode. He’s posted a video that describes using Markdown in Emacs. I’m very much a “different strokes for different folks” type of guy as the Hippies used to … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Running Asynchronous Processes in Eshell

Posted on 2021-12-27 by jcs

Nacho Barrientos has an interesting video in which he explains how to run an eshell process in the background. Barrientos illustrates this with the sleep command. Normally, if you enter sleep 4 in Eshell, Emacs will hang until sleep completes … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Sam Editor

Posted on 2021-12-26 by jcs

I’ve used most of the traditional editors. By “traditional” I mean editors like ed, ex, vi/vim, Emacs, Acme, and even—back in the day—brief. One editor I’ve never tried is Sam. Sam, like Acme, was written by Rob Pike so if … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Exporting Math to Word or LibreOffice

Posted on 2021-12-25 by jcs

Any of you with an even fleeting familiarity with Irreal know that we are not fans of Word and its evil siblings. Still, even though our official position is that Word—in all its incarnations—is the spawn of the Devil, we … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment