Author Archives: jcs

Dubious Password Advice

Posted on 2020-05-28 by jcs

Jacob Bergdahl over at Towards Data Science has an article discussing what makes a good password. His advice is not entirely wrong but has some problems. His main point is that greenelephantswithtophat is a better password than jK8v!ge4D. That’s probably … Continue reading →

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Emacs Through Macros 7–9

Posted on 2020-05-27 by jcs

Once again, I lost track of Sahas Subramanian’s Emacs through macros videos and while I wasn’t looking he’s posted 3 more. Number 7 is about grep and doesn’t use macros in any significant way. Number 8 is an exercise that … Continue reading →

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An Org Refile Workflow

Posted on 2020-05-26 by jcs

Yiming Chen has an interesting post on his org-refile workflow. Before you read his post, though, you should (re)read Aaron Bieber’s Organizing Notes With Refile that I wrote about back in 2018. Bieber’s post gives you the background you need … Continue reading →

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Eshell Demo

Posted on 2020-05-25 by jcs

Protesilaos Stavrou is all in on Eshell. On the very rare occasions that he needs a “standard shell,” he fires it up in Emacs using vterm but mostly he uses Eshell because he considers it a superior solution. He’s posted … Continue reading →

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Websockets: Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Posted on 2020-05-24 by jcs

Websockets are a handy device that allow for snappier browser/server interactions. Like all useful things, the usual bad actors have found a way to abuse them. It turns out that a Web site you are visiting can port scan your … Continue reading →

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Elfeed Tweaks

Posted on 2020-05-23 by jcs

On Thursday, Mike Zamansky published a video on some tweaks he made to Elfeed. As soon as I wrote and published a post about it, I found two more posts on hacking Elfeed to make it better fit the tweaker’s … Continue reading →

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Zamansky 72: Customizing Elfeed

Posted on 2020-05-22 by jcs

Mike Zamansky has a new video up in his Using Emacs Series and an update on his last video (Zamansky 71: Openwith). Let’s deal with the update first. As you’ll recall, the problem Zamansky was trying to solve was being … Continue reading →

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The NYT and Customer Surveillance

Posted on 2020-05-21 by jcs

Irreal has been railing against adtech and the malware that advertisers download onto our computers to facilitate their tracking for a long time. Despite pretty compelling evidence that it doesn’t work, its use continues unabated. There is, however, a modicum … Continue reading →

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Advanced Usage of the Org Agenda

Posted on 2020-05-20 by jcs

A great deal of my Emacs tube time is spent displaying the Org agenda. My use of the agenda is probably not standard: I use it mainly as a portal into my log type entries. There are some TODO entries … Continue reading →

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Setting the Initial Visibility of Magit Sections

Posted on 2020-05-19 by jcs

Like most Emacsers, I very seldom restart Emacs. When I do it’s usually because I just finished my weekly ELPA update. Despite my extensive configuration, Emacs starts up reasonably quickly for me but I still hate restarting it. The major … Continue reading →

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