Author Archives: jcs

Fixing Email

Posted on 2020-06-17 by jcs

From time to time I read a piece by some pundit proclaiming that email is dead; that it’s been supplanted by texting, Facebook, and other social media. Such pieces are, of course, ridiculous but it is true that the usual … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Another One Falls

Posted on 2020-06-16 by jcs

MIT has just ended negotiations with Elsevier on a new journals contract. Many institutions are doing that but MIT and the University of California, which also ended negotiations, are in the top tier of research institutions in the US and … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Zamansky 73: Ripgrep

Posted on 2020-06-15 by jcs

Mike Zamansky has another great video up in his Using Emacs Series. This time it’s about using ripgrep to do some refactoring of his blog. The problem is that for reasons explained in the video, he upgraded Hugo—his blog software—and … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Org Table Export

Posted on 2020-06-14 by jcs

Here’s an interesting tip from John D. Cook’s TeX and Typography Twitter feed: You can export an org-mode table as LaTeX with the Emacs command org-table-export. — TeX and Typography (@TeXtip) June 12, 2020 The idea is that you can … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Consistent Documents Redux

Posted on 2020-06-13 by jcs

Just a quickie today. Recently, someone tweeted a link to Mike Hamrick’s terrific video on making consistent documents with Emacs and Org-mode. I’ve written about the video before but having rewatched it, I decided that it was worth revisiting. There’s … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

A Graphviz Go-By

Posted on 2020-06-12 by jcs

When I want a graph like this: my go-to tool is the dot command from Graphviz. There’s a simple input language to describe a graph that’s easy to write by hand but most often I generate the input programmatically. It’s … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Emacs Comment Functions

Posted on 2020-06-11 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov over at Emacs Redux has taken some time off from his open source projects such as rubocop, nrepl, cider, prelude, projectile, and many others to write a useful post on the various Emacs commenting commands. It turns out … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

More Google Suits

Posted on 2020-06-10 by jcs

A week ago I wrote about Arizona suing Google over data collection. Arizona’s complaint is that Google collects location information even if you turn it off. Since that data collection was for maps and weather, I was willing to give … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Editor Keystrokes

Posted on 2020-06-09 by jcs

It’s surprising to me that many people still don’t know where some of the keystrokes we use everyday in our editors came from. The most famous example, I suppose, is why Vi(m) uses the j k h l keys for … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Zettelkastens in 10 Minutes

Posted on 2020-06-08 by jcs

Tomas Vik has a very nice post introducing the Zettelkasten concept. He says that rather than spending hours researching the Zettelkasten idea, you can just read his post and get a good introduction. I especially liked his section on the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment