Author Archives: jcs

Minimalism

Posted on 2019-07-25 by jcs

As I wrote in my Ten Years post, I’ve become interested in leveraging my digital life style as a way of further simplifying my life. My post on everyday carry is an example of this: searching for ways to minimize … Continue reading →

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The Holy War

Posted on 2019-07-24 by jcs

After writing yesterday’s post on Vim vs. Emacs, I serendipitously saw a tweet pointing at the Wikipedia article on the Editor War. It describes our holiest of holy wars and gives a pretty thorough analysis of both sides’ views. The … Continue reading →

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Vim vs. Emacs

Posted on 2019-07-23 by jcs

One of our longest standing holy wars is Emacs versus Vim. I’ve been around long enough that I’ve seen all the jokes and memes. Seen them over and over again, in fact. At this point, I doubt anyone is even … Continue reading →

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The First Rule

Posted on 2019-07-22 by jcs

For many years I had the good fortune to work with a small team of very talented software engineers. The team stayed together across many jobs working for many different companies. Our work was always related to computer networking and … Continue reading →

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Making The Results Block Executable

Posted on 2019-07-21 by jcs

Over at the Emacs Stack Exchange, shackra asks how he can make the RESULTS block of an Org babel SRC block executable by the shell. In other words, he wants to build a shell script in one block and be … Continue reading →

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Fun and Games

Posted on 2019-07-20 by jcs

For those of you living in saner parts of the world who might not know, the Irreal International Headquarters are located in Tampa, Florida, which is recognized as the lightning capital of North America. Indeed, Tampa comes from an Indian … Continue reading →

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The Speed of Offlineimap vs. Mbsync

Posted on 2019-07-19 by jcs

One of the problems faced by those of us who have moved our email operations into Emacs is how to download the emails from the Imap server. There are two popular solutions: offlineimap and mbsync. Offlineimap is written in Python … Continue reading →

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The Gauntlet Is Thrown

Posted on 2019-07-18 by jcs

I’ve written many times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) about the open access wars between universities and academic publishers. In a move that almost certainly signals the beginning of the end game, the University of California has refused to renew … Continue reading →

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Text Based Email Clients

Posted on 2019-07-17 by jcs

Many people can’t imagine life without a shiny, GUI-based email client. The idea of using a text based client would never occur to them and some probably don’t even know there are such things. Others of us don’t want to … Continue reading →

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Update to Writing a Thesis With Org Mode

Posted on 2019-07-16 by jcs

Last year I wrote about Daniel Gomez’s post on writing a PhD thesis with Org-mode. Gomez’s post was an excellent exposition of the workflow that he used to write his thesis using Org. One of the most useful features was … Continue reading →

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