Author Archives: jcs

Iteration with Elisp

Posted on 2021-09-22 by jcs

John Kitchen has important things to do so naturally he’s procrastinating. That’s probably bad for him but it’s good for us because he has another Elisp video up. This one considers various ways of iterating in Elisp. Earlier, he had … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

String Formatting

Posted on 2021-09-21 by jcs

One of the things we programmers do all the time is to build strings of the sort In a survey of 342 programmers, 312 preferred Emacs. where the two numbers and the string “Emacs” are variables. If, like me, you … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The COVID-19 Disinformation Campaign

Posted on 2021-09-20 by jcs

I’ve written several times about the origin of COVID-19 but there are still no answers. What has become clear, however, is that we’ve been subjected to an organized disinformation campaign. In February of 2020 The Lancet published a letter from … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Embracing the Emacs Way

Posted on 2021-09-19 by jcs

If you’re looking for an introduction to The Way of Emacs, there’s a long article that explores the Emacs way and why it’s worthwhile embracing despite what seems, at first, to be a formidable learning curve. There are a couple … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Annotating a Text File

Posted on 2021-09-18 by jcs

Chewxy had a need to annotate a text file. He wanted to mark a rectangle of text, capture a classification type, and write the results to a JSON file. He thought about writing a Web app to do it but … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Reverse Warrants Explode

Posted on 2021-09-17 by jcs

The new hotness in law enforcement is reverse warrants. Those are warrants that aren’t targeted at an individual but specify some criterion and seek to identify all individuals who meet that criterion. The most common example is the so-called geofence … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Placement of Quotation Marks

Posted on 2021-09-16 by jcs

I’m pretty much a strict constructionist when it come to grammar issues but there are exceptions. I’m not above starting a sentence with “And” or “But” and my comma usage is driven by what I see as logical and making … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Time Tracking With Org-mode

Posted on 2021-09-15 by jcs

I’m Bmax has a post about his journey to find the perfect way to track his time. Like almost everyone else, he started with a spreadsheet but if you’ve ever done that you know what a pain it is and … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Another Emacs Configuration

Posted on 2021-09-14 by jcs

As you all know—at least if you’ve been around Irreal for a while—I like reading through other peoples Emacs configurations. It’s not just a matter of voyeurism; I almost always learn something from seeing how others use Emacs. The latest … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Two Mini Tutorials

Posted on 2021-09-13 by jcs

Here are a couple of mini-tutorials on using two Emacs packages. They’re both pretty short so I’ve combined them into a single post. In the first, Yuri Tricys presents some configurations and packages to customize Olivetti-mode. He shows how to … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment