Author Archives: jcs

Apple’s New Maps

Posted on 2018-07-04 by jcs

Way back in 2012, I wrote about Apple venturing into maps and the problems they were having. As I said at the time, getting good map data is extraordinarily hard—Google at the time had over 7,000 people working on their … Continue reading →

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Don’t Be a Peripheral

Posted on 2018-07-03 by jcs

Here’s a little red meat for the Vim vs. Emacs crowd: #Mindrot #categories #computerworld #emacs "If it runs Emacs, it's a computer. Otherwise, it's a peripheral" –jwz — mindrot (@mintrod) July 2, 2018

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A BBEdit Challenge

Posted on 2018-07-02 by jcs

My friend Watts tweets that he thinks BBEdit has the simplest workflow for doing a search and replace on the files of a directory that do not include some term: I’m sure BBEdit isn’t the only editor that can do … Continue reading →

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Zamansky 50: Presentations

Posted on 2018-07-01 by jcs

Mike Zamansky is getting ready to give a presentation at a professional conference. As always, this means preparing a slide deck and Zamansky is faced with deciding how to do it. In the past, he’s described reveal.js as his go … Continue reading →

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Two Videos on Early Unix

Posted on 2018-06-30 by jcs

I just came across some old videos from AT&T about Unix that are worth taking some time to watch. I thought I had written about them before but I couldn’t find any mention of them either locally or on Irreal … Continue reading →

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The Emacs Commune

Posted on 2018-06-29 by jcs

Someone posted a chapter from Sam Williams’ book Free as in Freedom (online here), that discusses the early history of Emacs. The chapter, The Emacs Commune, is full of things I didn’t know about how Emacs evolved from the TECO … Continue reading →

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HTTPS Is Easy

Posted on 2018-06-28 by jcs

Troy Hunt, whom I’ve written about many times, has performed a public service by putting together 4 simple videos that show how easy it is to implement HTTPS on your site. The link takes you to a blog post that … Continue reading →

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An Emacs Interface to the macOS System Dictionary

Posted on 2018-06-27 by jcs

As I’ve said many times, I consider abo-abo’s define-word one of my most useful packages. I use it several times a day. If you’re looking for a dictionary that ties in seamlessly with Emacs, you should take a look at … Continue reading →

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Literate Programming Using Org Babel

Posted on 2018-06-26 by jcs

Gregory Stein has an excellent post on Literate Programming with Org-Mode. Despite the title, it’s really more about leveraging Org Babel to create literate documents that contain notes, code, and results. This is, of course, the same area that Howard … Continue reading →

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Howard Abrams on Capturing Data to the Current Task

Posted on 2018-06-25 by jcs

Howard Abrams has a very nice post in which he talks about how he uses Org capture in his workflow. Most of us are familiar with Org capture and the use of templates to store data in some Org file. … Continue reading →

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