Author Archives: jcs

Programmatic Programming with Graphviz

Posted on 2020-10-19 by jcs

Correl Roush has a very nice post that beautifully illustrates the idea of writing code to write code. It’s a tremendously powerful idea because it lets you leverage some other program or programming language to do a task that requires … Continue reading →

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Emacs Shells

Posted on 2020-10-18 by jcs

One of the things that’s harder than it should be in Emacs is embedded shells. You can type Meta+x shell and sort of have a shell. Except it doesn’t work very well. There are other options but it can be … Continue reading →

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Voting in Estonia

Posted on 2020-10-17 by jcs

Almost every expert says that you can’t vote online safely. You see the opinion so often it’s become received wisdom. Yet that’s exactly what happens in Estonia. Estonians can vote from anywhere in the world and can vote as often … Continue reading →

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How To Get Rid of Cookie Popups

Posted on 2020-10-16 by jcs

One of the annoying consequences of the GDPR is the popups asking you if it’s okay to set cookies. Mostly, those cookies are used to track us and are something we definitely don’t want to enable. Sadly, some of those … Continue reading →

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A Medievalist Uses Emacs

Posted on 2020-10-15 by jcs

The title almost sounds like something you’d see headlining a parody but it turns out that a medievalist using Emacs is really what this post is about. Joseph R. Johnson is a medievalist at Georgetown who spends a great deal … Continue reading →

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Everyday Carry Progress Report

Posted on 2020-10-14 by jcs

Regular readers know that I’m all in on living a digital life and in particular on getting my everyday carry down to my smartphone (see here and here). This post is a progress report. Ironically, COVID-19 has helped advance my … Continue reading →

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Org Code Block Results

Posted on 2020-10-13 by jcs

John Herrlin has a followup to his previous post about Org-mode code blocks. This one deals with controlling the output of a block’s execution. I usually think of the :results parameter as a way of choosing where the results from … Continue reading →

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Useful Tools

Posted on 2020-10-12 by jcs

Nikhil Marathe has an interesting post on what he calls “Mystery Knowledge.” By Mystery Knowledge he means knowledge that you aren’t apt to discover on your own but that is easy to learn once it’s been pointed out and, when … Continue reading →

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Compiling Gccemacs on macOS

Posted on 2020-10-11 by jcs

I’ve written a few times about gccemacs (1, 2, 3) and what it means for the future of Emacs. The good news is that it’s being merged into the Master branch and with any luck will make its first official … Continue reading →

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Is Emacs Doomed?

Posted on 2020-10-10 by jcs

No. Of course not. The commentary one sees on Emacs is much like that one sees for Apple: This latest [smartphone | editor] is an [iPhone | Emacs] killer. Besides, the iPhone/Emacs is old, tired technology. It’s doomed. And yet, … Continue reading →

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