Author Archives: jcs

Git With Solo Projects

Posted on 2021-05-06 by jcs

Over at Fosslife, V.M. Brasseur considers the question of why you should use Git, or some other version control system, for your solo projects. Brasseur was shocked when one of her coworkers expressed surprise that she used Git even for … Continue reading →

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Fish Sticks

Posted on 2021-05-05 by jcs

I just saw an article that incited in me an atavistic fear and loathing. What was it that left me trembling and whimpering? Fish sticks. The very name brings back childhood horrors. Long ago, in the dark ages before the … Continue reading →

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Using Org-capture With Org-drill

Posted on 2021-05-04 by jcs

I saw a pointer to this New York Emacs Meetup talk from 2016. It’s about how Josh Moller-Mara uses org-drill and org-capture together to learn Chinese. Most of us don’t need to learn Chinese, of course, but we all do … Continue reading →

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Paper on Native Compilation

Posted on 2021-05-03 by jcs

If you’ve been following the Emacs native compilation effort and are curious about the technical details, Andrea Corallo, Luca Nassi, and Nicola Mancahave have an arXiv paper that describes Bringing GNU Emacs to Native Code. The paper does a good … Continue reading →

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Three Useful Emacs Packages

Posted on 2021-05-02 by jcs

Emacs-Elements has a short video that describes three useful packages that save various pieces of Emacs state. The three packages are: real-auto-save persistent-scratch session The first, real-auto-save, saves the file you’re working on when Emacs is idle for a configurable … Continue reading →

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Marks and Regions

Posted on 2021-05-01 by jcs

David Wilson has a new video out on efficient text selection in Emacs. You can’t really understand text selection in Emacs without understanding the mark. The basic fact is that the currently selected text—the region in Emacs lingo—is the collection … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: How Not To Design Signs

Posted on 2021-04-30 by jcs

As promised, no journalists were harmed in the posting of this Red Meat Friday. Instead, via Karl Voit, I present this example of really atrocious design. How To Irritate People: pic.twitter.com/Tbrz4myYhy — Bruno Kassel (@BrunoKassel) April 28, 2021 The perpetrators … Continue reading →

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And You Don’t Mess Around With Jim

Posted on 2021-04-29 by jcs

The late Jim Croce famously sang You don’t tug on Superman’s cape You don’t spit into the wind You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger And you don’t mess around with Jim Cloudflare has another item for … Continue reading →

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Bastien on Using TODO Lists Efficiently

Posted on 2021-04-28 by jcs

Bastien Guerry, longtime maintainer and advocate for Org-mode, has a few thoughts on using TODO list efficiently. His thoughts are distilled from 15 years of using Org to keep his TODO list and schedule his tasks. The chief challenge, he … Continue reading →

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The Post Office and Surveillance

Posted on 2021-04-27 by jcs

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has fallen on hard times. The Internet, email, FedEx, and UPS have been eating their lunch for years. It’s not hard to see why. A first class letter costs 55¢ with delivery time measured in … Continue reading →

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