Author Archives: jcs

Video: How WeChat and Alipay Dominates Chinese Life

Posted on 2018-06-04 by jcs

I’ve written several times (1, 2, 3, 4) about how China has embraced the digital life and use their smartphones for everything from paying for lunch to interacting with the government. This is made possible largely by the WeChat and … Continue reading →

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A Thesaurus for Emacs

Posted on 2018-06-03 by jcs

If you do your writing with Emacs rather than a “word processor,” you may have found yourself wanting an easy-to-use thesaurus that is integrated with Emacs. Even if you subscribe to John McPhee’s Draft #4 advice and mostly use a … Continue reading →

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Emacs 26, Threads, and Generators

Posted on 2018-06-02 by jcs

One of the things that a lot of people are exited about in Emacs 26 is the introduction of basic threading. Another, less mentioned, feature is generators. The excellent Chris Wellons has a must-read post that talks about both of … Continue reading →

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Recursion

Posted on 2018-06-01 by jcs

Mike Zamansky has an interesting post on recursion. The question at hand is whether it makes sense to teach recursion to beginning programming students. Zamansky was a high school CS teacher for many years and now he’s involved—at least in … Continue reading →

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Introduction to EWW

Posted on 2018-05-31 by jcs

I’ve been making a point of trying to use the Emacs Web Wowser (eww) when it makes sense. As much as I’d love to move browsing into Emacs—and thus realize my goal of virtually never leaving it—sadly eww can’t replace … Continue reading →

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Eshell and Emacs Everywhere

Posted on 2018-05-30 by jcs

Seven or eight months ago, I wrote about a couple of posts from Pierre Neidhardt (Ambrevar) concerning Eshell and the utility of doing as much as possible in Emacs (1, 2). Since then, he’s revised them a bit from the … Continue reading →

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The Cost of Adtech

Posted on 2018-05-29 by jcs

As a result of the GDPR going into effect, USA Today is—presumably temporarily—running a special version of their site for those in the European Union. This version has all the ads and tracking scripts disabled. Marcel Freinbichler shows us the … Continue reading →

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Emacs 26.1 Is Out

Posted on 2018-05-28 by jcs

Nico Petton tweets the good news: And… #Emacs 26.1 is out! https://t.co/v3BrlQhmMA — Nicolas Petton (@NicolasPetton) May 28, 2018 I’ve already downloaded, compiled, and installed it and am writing this with the new version. If you’re on macOS, here’s my … Continue reading →

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f-strings in Elisp

Posted on 2018-05-27 by jcs

John Kitchin, as you probably know, is a fan of Python as well as of Emacs. One of the things he really likes in Python 3 is f-strings. They allow you to do things like import datetime today=datetime.datetime.today() name=”J. Random … Continue reading →

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The Irreal Privacy Policy

Posted on 2018-05-26 by jcs

As far as I can tell, the GDPR does not apply to Irreal. Nevertheless, Irreal is trivially in compliance because we don’t collect or store any information about our readers. Even if we did collect such information, we would never … Continue reading →

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