Author Archives: jcs

ELPA Failing to Load Packages

Posted on 2019-08-14 by jcs

I always update my Emacs packages on Sunday. I’ve found that upgrading once a week is more than enough and helps limit the ever-increasing entropy here at Irreal. This past Sunday, I noticed that there was a new Org-mode in … Continue reading →

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The DMV and NULL: A Cautionary Tale

Posted on 2019-08-13 by jcs

The other day, I came across an amusing story on the KNRS Website. It involved an IT worker named Droogie who thought it would be fun to prank the DMV by buying the vanity license plate “NULL”. It was, he … Continue reading →

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The Never Googlers

Posted on 2019-08-12 by jcs

Resistance to Google and its spying may be going mainstream. Well, at least people outside of tech are talking about it and taking action. For some time, a small group of noisy people have been shouting about Google’s relentless spying … Continue reading →

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What Happened At Boeing?

Posted on 2019-08-11 by jcs

As the dismal story of the Boeing 737 Max fiasco drags on, it’s worth taking a look at how the disaster happened. Boeing, after all, has been around since 1916—to put that in context, the Wright brothers made their famous … Continue reading →

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An Emacs Tale From Bizarro World

Posted on 2019-08-10 by jcs

One of the most constant complaints about Emacs is its reliance on finger mangling key chords forever memorialized by the “Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift” backronym. Indeed, many Emacs users, including some Irreal regulars, use one of the vi emulation packages, evil, Spacemacs, or … Continue reading →

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Another Why I Use Emacs

Posted on 2019-08-09 by jcs

Kasim Tuman has a nice blog post entitled Why Emacs in which he discusses why he likes Emacs and his strategy for getting the most out of it. His viewpoint is interesting and worth reading. Tuman thinks of Emacs as … Continue reading →

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Managing Dotfiles with Org

Posted on 2019-08-08 by jcs

I’ve written before about the idea of combining your dotfiles into a single Org file and then tangling them out to their proper locations. That’s a nice solution because it provides an easy way to document what you’re doing and … Continue reading →

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Composability in Vim

Posted on 2019-08-07 by jcs

To the uninitiated, Vim’s command set seems a mishmash of arbitrary letter sequences that don’t seem to make any sense. To make matters worse, there are a lot of them. The truth, though, is that the commands are very regular … Continue reading →

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Bayes’ Theorem and The Replication Crisis

Posted on 2019-08-06 by jcs

I’ve written before about the replication crisis and the shockingly low reproducibility rates in scientific research. I’ve usually focused on psychology but sadly medicine is even worse. I’ve usually viewed these problems through the lens of reproducible research and have … Continue reading →

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Emacscalc Script

Posted on 2019-08-05 by jcs

I’ve often written about how powerful and useful Emacs calc can be1. It is, I think, one of the most underrated features of Emacs. It’s a bit hard to learn, not because its default data entry mode is RPN but … Continue reading →

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