Author Archives: jcs

A Passport on Your iPhone

Posted on 2020-07-07 by jcs

I haven’t written about my dream of a walletless life for a while. My end goal, as I’ve written before, is to be able to leave the house with nothing but my iPhone. That would mean using Apple Pay to … Continue reading →

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Some Register Tips

Posted on 2020-07-06 by jcs

Tory Anderson has a handy post that reminds us about the utility of registers in Emacs. It’s easy to forget about them but they’re incredibly useful and flexible. Anderson considers three of the major use-cases: Saving text in a register. … Continue reading →

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Wanted: The World’s Smallest Violin

Posted on 2020-07-05 by jcs

The crybabies making up a Google-backed group of European advertisers are very upset that Apple will shortly require apps to notify users that they intend to track them and ask their permission first. As Yoda might say, “The schadenfreude is … Continue reading →

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Org Covers 90% of Blogger’s Life

Posted on 2020-07-04 by jcs

Stormrider has an interesting and inspiring post in which he says that 90% of his life is handled by Org-mode. Stormrider is a technical writer and occasional programmer. As such, he is a perfect example of someone who can benefit … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: What Could Have Been

Posted on 2020-07-03 by jcs

Here’s some red meat for all you parentheses haters and Blub users: Society if Lisp had been industry standard since 1958 pic.twitter.com/cRsaDTMPmP — julesh (@_julesh_) July 2, 2020 It’s probably a little hyperbolic but it feels right to us Lisp … Continue reading →

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Sci Hub and Citations

Posted on 2020-07-02 by jcs

Via Paul Graham he have this interesting factoid: … articles downloaded from Sci-hub were cited 1.72 times more than papers not downloaded from Sci-hub and that the number of downloads from Sci-hub was a robust predictor of future citations https://t.co/LiX0Gs555b … Continue reading →

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Eshell vs. Shell

Posted on 2020-07-01 by jcs

Pierre Neidhardt (ambrevar) has a very interesting post on the relative merits of Emacs’ Eshell and Bash using Meta+x shell. Like me, he is, or was, a longtime user, adherent, and booster of Eshell. Lately, though, he’s been feeling some … Continue reading →

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A New Take on the Emacs Tutorial

Posted on 2020-06-30 by jcs

Over at Emacs Notes there’s a post offerng a new take on the built-in Emacs Tutorial. There’s nothing special about the default tutorial. It’s merely a file describing Emacs functionality. It’s interactive, sort of, in that you can edit the … Continue reading →

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Protecting Yourself from Surveillance

Posted on 2020-06-29 by jcs

Jesse McGraw knows a few things about black hat hacking. He was a participant himself and was convicted of corrupting industrial control systems. Over at Forklog he has an interesting article on some steps you can take to protect yourself … Continue reading →

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Selective Display

Posted on 2020-06-28 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a post that reminds me of a useful command that I always forget about: selective-display. Borkowski uses it to make working with some large JSON files easier. Take a look at his post for the details. … Continue reading →

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