Author Archives: jcs

Digital Payments in Developing Countries

Posted on 2020-05-13 by jcs

As all of you know by now, I’m a big fan of the digital lifestyle but I have a first-world perspective. I want to be able to use Apple pay because it’s easier and I don’t have to carry around … Continue reading →

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Better Emacs Configuration with use-package

Posted on 2020-05-12 by jcs

Menno Finlay-Smits has an interesting post on using John Wiegley’s use-package package. It’s a fairly short post but Finlay-Smits makes a good case that the package make Emacs configuration cleaner and easier. As he also points out, it’s easy to … Continue reading →

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Zetteldeft

Posted on 2020-05-11 by jcs

This is another entry in my series of posts on the idea of a Zettelkasten. Although I’ve mostly written about and am planning to use org-roam, that’s not the only possibility. Elias Storms built his own Zettelkasten by leveraging the … Continue reading →

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COVID-19 and Open Offices

Posted on 2020-05-10 by jcs

There’s not many beneficial outcomes from the current COVID-19 crisis but The New York Times suggests one possibility: the end of open plan offices. The Times doesn’t say that open plan offices will go away because of the pandemic but … Continue reading →

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Zettelkasten Explained

Posted on 2020-05-09 by jcs

I’ve finished reading Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes and, as promised, I’ve started exploring Jethro Kuan’s Org-roam as a way of implementing my own Zettelkasten. I’ve downloaded and installed Org-roam and am currently going over the documentation. In … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: iPhones and Sanity

Posted on 2020-05-08 by jcs

The other day, I wrote about Aaron Ogle’s experience in de-Googling his workflow. Although I didn’t mention it, he wrote that part of his de-Googling efforts were to replace his Android phone with an iPhone. It was, he said—undoubtedly tongue-in-cheek—an … Continue reading →

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Learning Emacs with Macros 2–5

Posted on 2020-05-07 by jcs

After I wrote about the first Learning Emacs with Macros video, I kept an eye out for subsequent episodes because I really liked the first. I didn’t see any but in the latest edition of Sacha’s Emacs News I saw … Continue reading →

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Vivek Haldar on How Unix Won

Posted on 2020-05-06 by jcs

Vivek Haldar has an interesting essay on How Unix Won and it why it may now be entering its end phase. From a technical standpoint, the main reason Unix fared so well is that it was written by programmers for … Continue reading →

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Minibuffer Help

Posted on 2020-05-05 by jcs

Just a quickie today. Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a useful post on providing help in the minibuffer. It turns out that you can always type Ctrl+h when responding to a prompt in the minibuffer. If you have some code prompting … Continue reading →

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Compiling Elisp to Native Code

Posted on 2020-05-04 by jcs

Even if you don’t obsess over Emacs like, ahem, some people, you’ve probably heard about the project to compile Elisp to native code. The idea is that the Elisp byte code would be compiled to GCC IR (intermediate representation) code … Continue reading →

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