Author Archives: jcs

Blogging With (Only) Emacs

Posted on 2020-03-13 by jcs

If you’re an Emacser and a blogger, you will, of course, want to write and publish your posts from within Emacs. If you’re using WordPress, org2blog provides an excellent solution. You write your posts in Emacs and Org-mode as usual … Continue reading →

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Smart Notes

Posted on 2020-03-12 by jcs

I’m currently reading Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes, a book that describes Niklas Luhmann’s method of taking, storing, and retrieving notes about ideas he thought could be useful later. Luhmann kept his notes on what amounted to index … Continue reading →

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Org and Anki

Posted on 2020-03-11 by jcs

If you took my advice and checked out Ali Abdaal’s videos on evidence-based study techniques, you know that one of the two guiding principles of effective learning is spaced repetition. An easy way to do that is to start with … Continue reading →

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Happy 47th Birthday, Dark Side of the Moon

Posted on 2020-03-10 by jcs

As I do every year on this day, I want to pause for a brief moment to consider the glory of one of the best albums ever recorded: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Wikipedia says that it was … Continue reading →

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COVID-19

Posted on 2020-03-09 by jcs

Even if you are living under a rock, you’ve no doubt heard a lot about COVID-19 and its potential to be a serious pandemic. There is, it turns out, not much you can do about the threat other than taking … Continue reading →

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Notion and Org Mode

Posted on 2020-03-08 by jcs

Ali Abdaal, whom I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, is a physician and YouTuber from Britain. He’s a geek who at least once a week uploads a video usually about medicine, tech, or studying and learning. If you’re a … Continue reading →

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Innumeracy and the Press

Posted on 2020-03-07 by jcs

It’s no secret that Irreal doesn’t hold the press in very high regard. There are, of course, exceptions but too many journalists are ignorant and lazy. That seems overwrought but consider this example: Mekita Rivas, a journalist who writes for … Continue reading →

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Some Simple Tramp Tricks

Posted on 2020-03-06 by jcs

One of the great and mostly underappreciated features of Emacs is the Tramp system that lets you seamlessly edit files on a remote computer. There are, of course, situations where Tramp is not the right answer—working with large files on … Continue reading →

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File Hierarchies

Posted on 2020-03-05 by jcs

A nice post from Karl Voit has been languishing in my blog queue since January and I realized that it was time to write about it. In the post, Voit argues that complex file hierarchies are the wrong answer. If … Continue reading →

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The First Pretest for Emacs 27.1 is Ready

Posted on 2020-03-04 by jcs

Nicolas Petton writes that the first pretest for Emacs 27.1, Emacs 27.0.90, is available for download and testing. If you don’t mind living a bit on the edge and would like to try out the latest and greatest, give it … Continue reading →

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