Author Archives: jcs

Speaking of Passwords

Posted on 2019-09-22 by jcs

Yesterday, I wrote about stupid password rules and why they don’t matter for banks. Serendipitously, right after I published that post I came across an old Coding Horror post on stupid password rules. It’s a long and righteous rant on … Continue reading →

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Troy Hunt on Bank Passwords

Posted on 2019-09-21 by jcs

Over the years, I’ve done a lot of huffing and puffing about passwords, most recently in my post on Bad Password Policies. Troy Hunt has a slightly different take on things, at least as far as banks are concerned. It … Continue reading →

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The New Luddites Take Off the Mask

Posted on 2019-09-20 by jcs

The other day I thanked the New York Times for proving my point. Now it’s The Guardian’s turn, albeit for a different point. I’m sure that by now many of you roll your eyes and think, Reagan like, “there he … Continue reading →

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Four Org-mode Talks

Posted on 2019-09-19 by jcs

The SF Emacs Meetup group has a video of one of their recent meetings featuring talks by four Org-mode users. The middle two talks, Tikhon Elvis on reveal.js and Jeff Tull on Org Babel, are elementary overviews. They’ll be useful … Continue reading →

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Emacs Workout

Posted on 2019-09-18 by jcs

Tony Ballantyne is an Emacs-using Science Fiction writer whom I’ve written about before. Ballantyne has an interesting device to help him remember Emacs commands: the Emacs workout. The idea is to write short summaries of Emacs features that you find … Continue reading →

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The New York Times Proves My Point

Posted on 2019-09-17 by jcs

Last week, I reminded everyone that Irreal doesn’t hold journalists in high regard and that Apple, in particular, appears to bring out the worst in tech reporters. The Paper of Record must have been feeling left out because they published … Continue reading →

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The Google Nest Hub Max

Posted on 2019-09-16 by jcs

I don’t know about you but I couldn’t help thinking of telescreens from Nineteen Eighty-four when I read this article about Google’s always on Nest Hub Max. The similarities are striking. The camera is always watching so that it can … Continue reading →

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Exporting Only the Contents of An Org Subtree

Posted on 2019-09-15 by jcs

Here’s a short Org-mode tip that, although quite old, I just learned about. Suppose you want to export an Org subtree but you want only the contents and not the header. This emacs-reddit question, which alerted me to the solution, … Continue reading →

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Bad Password Policies

Posted on 2019-09-14 by jcs

It seems like I’ve been shouting into the wind forever about password policies and it hasn’t made a bit of difference. There’s probably little anyone can do about users choosing really dumb passwords—like password or 123456 and so forth—but you’d … Continue reading →

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Dumb-jump 0.5.3

Posted on 2019-09-13 by jcs

Back in 2017, I started using dumb-jump after seeing Mike Zamansky’s video demonstrating it. As I said at the time, it really hit the sweet spot for me. I have tried many times over my career to warm up to … Continue reading →

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