Author Archives: jcs

Tracking Pixels

Posted on 2021-02-25 by jcs

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, taking a break from criticizing the president who is not the president (it’s a Zen thing), has an excellent rant on the abomination that is email tracking pixels. As most Irreal readers surely know, tracking pixels … Continue reading →

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Customizing the Agenda

Posted on 2021-02-24 by jcs

If you’re an Org-mode user you’ve probably seen some of the custom Agenda displays that enterprising users have created. They can be useful for those who like to organize their activities and use the Agenda as a portal into that … Continue reading →

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Maintainers and Expectations

Posted on 2021-02-23 by jcs

I’ve written things like this before but apparently the right people weren’t paying attention. The free/open software movement depends substantially on volunteers. Yes, some companies contribute by paying their employees to work on projects they’re interested in and, of course, … Continue reading →

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Designing with Finite State Machines

Posted on 2021-02-22 by jcs

I’ve written before (see here and here for example) of my enthusiasm for using finite state machines (FSMs) in my design and coding. I had a C-based template that I used over and over. To implement a new state machine … Continue reading →

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Configuring Mbsync to Work with Gmail

Posted on 2021-02-21 by jcs

I long ago gave up using Gmail due to privacy concerns. Still, lots of folks—and companies—still use it because, among other things, it does have the advantage of portability that doesn’t depend on your current ISP or your OS. Gmail … Continue reading →

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Managing Window Placement

Posted on 2021-02-20 by jcs

One of the tropes of Emacs use is the idea that there’s always something new to learn about the editor. I know that to be true but today it was brought home to me by a new video from Protesilaos … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Word

Posted on 2021-02-19 by jcs

Microsoft Word: What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) typesetting software that is widely used for writing despite its lack of decent version control and text entry/editing functionality#vim #emacs #rmarkdown #pandoc — Martin Skarzynski (@marskar) February 18, 2021 And … Continue reading →

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Some Z Shell Tricks

Posted on 2021-02-18 by jcs

A lot of Linux people have been singing the praises of Zsh for a long time and even as a Mac user it was always an option but I never bothered. Part of that is that I mostly stay in … Continue reading →

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Exporting Org to HTML

Posted on 2021-02-17 by jcs

Jake B has a helpful video on exporting Org files to HTML. Irreal readers almost certainly knows how to do this so why am I writing about it? As you know, you can tweak your Org file to pull in … Continue reading →

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Paul Graham: What I Worked On

Posted on 2021-02-16 by jcs

By any reckoning, Paul Graham has had a pretty successful life. He’s recognized as an expert on Lisp and has written a couple of books on the subject. In addition to his accomplishments in computer science, he also trained as … Continue reading →

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