Author Archives: jcs

The GCHQ’s Need for Bulk Hacking has “Evolved”

Posted on 2018-12-10 by jcs

In what could be considered a corollary to The Iron Law of Data Collection1, the UK’s GCHQ (their version of the American NSA) has informed Parliament that their use of bulk device hacking—originally promised to be used sparingly only in … Continue reading →

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Experts Use Emacs and Vim

Posted on 2018-12-09 by jcs

Over at the Triplebyte Blog there’s an interesting post on editors, who uses them, what languages their users code in, and how their users did in their interviews. By now you’ve undoubtedly heard about that last aspect: Emacs and Vim … Continue reading →

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Literate Programming with Org-mode

Posted on 2018-12-08 by jcs

Niklas Carlsson has posted a rerecording of a talk he gave at work about the power of Org-mode for literate programming and exploratory programming in general. Although he is running Emacs with the Doom package, you should have no trouble … Continue reading →

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Query

Posted on 2018-12-07 by jcs

This is a question for Emacs users on macOS 10.14 (Mojave). Since upgrading to Mojave and recompiling Emacs with the display patches, I’m seeing a delay of about 5 or 6 seconds when I invoke Safari from Emacs. This happens, … Continue reading →

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The Ignorant, The Stupid, and The Insane

Posted on 2018-12-06 by jcs

Every Irreal reader knows, I’m sure, about the proposed encryption—anti-encryption is more accurate—law that the Australian Government is trying to push through Parliament. When it was first proposed, I thought that it was another case of politicians being ignorant of … Continue reading →

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You Are a Target

Posted on 2018-12-05 by jcs

Last week, I wrote in Nothing to Hide that although the “I Have Nothing to Hide” folks believe they are too unimportant to be targeted by governments and hackers, that is almost certainly wrong. Serendipitously, the current issue the SANS … Continue reading →

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The Psychology Replication Crisis

Posted on 2018-12-04 by jcs

I’ve written several times about the dismal reproducibility rate of experiments in Psychology. Mostly that’s been in support of my contention that “Tech Addiction” is a nonexistent problem made up by journalists looking for something to write about and supported—when … Continue reading →

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Capturing Receipts

Posted on 2018-12-03 by jcs

Moritz Schäfer has posted the workflow he uses to capture photos of receipts into an Org file. His method is to capture receipts by taking a photo of them with his smart phone using an app—it sounds like JotNot Pro—that … Continue reading →

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Making a Poster with Org-mode

Posted on 2018-12-02 by jcs

It is common in many academic fields to have “poster sessions” at their professional conferences where a quick synopsis of research results are presented in a poster. This is the case in Computer Science and, apparently, in medicine. Philipp Homan … Continue reading →

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Microsoft Data Collection

Posted on 2018-12-01 by jcs

I don’t get it. I. Just. Don’t. Get. It. A recent study commissioned by the Dutch Government found that Microsoft was collecting individual user data from the enterprise version of Office 365 including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook without any … Continue reading →

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