Author Archives: jcs

Two Quickies

Posted on 2021-04-26 by jcs

Ten Years At This Location Irreal will be 12 years old in July but 10 years ago today I published my first post at irreal.org. Before that, Irreal was hosted at Blogger and I posted sporadically at best. Once the … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging, General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Multiple Help Buffers

Posted on 2021-04-25 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) posted a potentially helpful tip on multiple help buffers. I say “potentially helpful” because his use case is pretty niche and it’s hard to think of others that are essentially different. Regardless, If you need multiple help … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Open Office Is Dead

Posted on 2021-04-24 by jcs

Open offices are dead. At least that’s what the sociopaths who foisted them off on protesting office workers—but never their bosses for some reason—say. An article in Fast Company says that the architects who have been pushing the open office … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Native Compilation Will Probably Be Merged This Weekend

Posted on 2021-04-23 by jcs

Eli Zaretskii writes that absent the discovery of any last minute blockers, native compilation will be merged into master this weekend. A problem with symlinks prevented the merging last weekend. At this point there are no more issues known so … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Fifteen Days with Dired

Posted on 2021-04-22 by jcs

Ramit Mittal is a new Spacemacs user who decided that for 15 days he would use Dired for all his file operations. That’s not hard to do. I don’t always use Dired but it’s usually easier than bringing up or … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Law Enforcement Pirates

Posted on 2021-04-21 by jcs

If you’re an American, the government can’t take your stuff without a legal finding of wrongdoing on your part. That’s what most Americans believe but they’re wrong. The government can, and does, confiscate citizens’ property without legal proceedings or even … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Switching to Emacs

Posted on 2021-04-20 by jcs

Protesilaos Stavrou has an interesting video that boils down to a lecture on the morality of free software in general and Emacs in particular. He frames the lecture in terms of his journey from a complete computer neophyte to the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Useful Emacs and Org-mode Features

Posted on 2021-04-19 by jcs

Karl Voit gave an excellent talk at Grazer Linuxtage 2021 on some Org Mode features that you may not know. The talk also covered some Emacs features that he uses to enhance his workflow. He has an outline of the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Writing Technical Documents with Org Mode

Posted on 2021-04-18 by jcs

alpha2phi has a nice post on writing documentation with Emacs and Org-mode. The post is reminiscent of Mike Hamrick’s video on keeping technical documents consistent and uses some of the same techniques. Alpha2phi starts with importing Fabrice Niessen’s excellent ReadTheOrg … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Walmart and Apple Pay: What COVID-19 Taught Me

Posted on 2021-04-17 by jcs

Everyday, I check the status of two items: Has the State of Florida finally rolled out their promised digital driver license program? Has Walmart finally accepted the inevitable and started accepting Apple Pay? So far, no joy but the two … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment