Author Archives: jcs

Ten Years

Posted on 2019-07-08 by jcs

Ten years ago today, the first ever Irreal post appeared on Blogger. It’s amusing to read what I thought the blog was going to be about. To be sure, I do sometimes write about Lisp and Scheme—although not so much … Continue reading →

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VisiCalc Redux

Posted on 2019-07-07 by jcs

A month ago, I wrote about Dan Bricklin’s TED talk on VisiCalc. Bricklin’s talk was in honor of the 40th anniversary of the modern spreadsheet. The spreadsheet idea was an old one but it was so labor intensive that it … Continue reading →

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Internet Villains

Posted on 2019-07-06 by jcs

This is hilarious. The UK government and a UK ISP trade group are wetting their pants because Google and Mozilla are planning to implement a more secure, privacy respecting DNS lookup in their browsers. They’ve even declared Google and Mozilla … Continue reading →

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Making a Function a Command

Posted on 2019-07-05 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has an interesting post on Emacs keyboard macros in the wild. He had a seemingly conventional repetitive editing task that he wanted to accomplish via Emacs keyboard macros but a few problems came up. It’s a nice … Continue reading →

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Deciding What Functions To Do In Emacs

Posted on 2019-07-04 by jcs

Extremeaxe5 has a question: Hardcore emacs users, what rules do you use to separate what you do from within emacs / what you do outside of e https://t.co/TwgxVlW89k #Emacs — Emacs BOT (@emacsbot) July 2, 2019 For me the answer … Continue reading →

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Chrome Has Become Surveillanceware

Posted on 2019-07-03 by jcs

Last year I wrote about Matthew Green’s post on why he was giving up the Chrome browser despite being a user for many years. The TL;DR was that Google’s decision to surreptitiously log the browser into Google when you used … Continue reading →

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Mickey on Polymode

Posted on 2019-07-02 by jcs

If you’ve been paying attention to the Emacs scene, you may have heard about Polymode, a package that lets you have two or more active major modes associated with a buffer. The first question to occur to many is, “Why … Continue reading →

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Microsoft Ebooks: The Past Comes Due

Posted on 2019-07-01 by jcs

It’s no longer news that Microsoft is closing down their ebook authentication server and those who have paid Microsoft for ebooks will shortly be unable to read them. It’s easy to say it’s their own fault and that’s not wrong … Continue reading →

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Ivy, Swiper, and Counsel Gain a New User

Posted on 2019-06-30 by jcs

Yesterday, I wrote about abo-abo’s recent enhancements to the Ivy UI. After I wrote that post, I saw this tweet: Yesterday I moved from my Ido & smex based workflow to ivy, sniper, and counsel. Transitioning was mostly smooth, and … Continue reading →

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Ivy and Directories

Posted on 2019-06-29 by jcs

Abo-abo posts that he has made some usability enhancements in Ivy directory handling. If you’re like me, Ivy is a fundamental part of your workflow. As abo-abo says, the original idea was simple: provide a list of strings and a … Continue reading →

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