Author Archives: jcs

An Overview of ASCII

Posted on 2017-01-28 by jcs

Last Wednesday Eric Raymond (ESR) wrote a blog post noticing that younger engineers no longer understood the ASCII code set at the bit level and didn’t understand what many of the non-printable characters were for. He speculated that this was … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

Zamansky 29: Using Shell and Eshell

Posted on 2017-01-27 by jcs

Mike Zamansky has posted the latest video in his Using Emacs series. This time it’s about using shell and eshell from within Emacs. Like Zamansky, I’m an old time command line user—I even used the MKS toolkit—and before Emacs I … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Open Offices are Bad for You

Posted on 2017-01-26 by jcs

Who knew? It turns out, though, that besides the noise and risk of contagion, open offices are also bad for your memory. Research shows that we retain more information when we sit in one spot. That’s because ideas and details … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Org Mode 9.0.4

Posted on 2017-01-25 by jcs

Bastien announced a new version of Org Mode. #emacs #orgmode 9.0.4 is out. Celebrating with a #unicorn I met in a store, with her baby unicorn. <3 pic.twitter.com/1vTE5AzQxD — Bastien Guerry (@bzg2) January 24, 2017 At the time I posted … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Tutorial on Building Reveal.js Slides with Org Mode

Posted on 2017-01-24 by jcs

Scott Nesbitt has posted a very useful tutorial on making Reveal.js slides with Org mode. There are lots of Reveal.js tutorials, of course, including the excellent video from Mike Zamansky but what sets Nesbitt’s tutorial apart is that he approaches … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Saving Keystrokes When Invoking the Agenda

Posted on 2017-01-23 by jcs

Ben Maughan spent a bit of time getting his Org agenda view just the way he liked it. Evidently, he is more efficient and/or busier than I am because he wanted to shorten the number of keys in the shortcut … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Right Dictionary

Posted on 2017-01-22 by jcs

A couple of years ago, I wrote about James Somers’ beautiful post on why you are probably using the wrong dictionary. The right dictionary, it turns out, is the 1913 + 1828 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary. You can read my … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Refining Spell Checking in Web-mode

Posted on 2017-01-21 by jcs

Chen Bin posted some nice Elisp on how to make flyspell at little more useful when dealing with Web-mode buffers. The problem is that many tag elements fail the spell check and you get a lot of spurious misspelling warnings. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Another Workflow

Posted on 2017-01-20 by jcs

Regular readers know that I’m fond of seeing other people’s workflows, especially those workflows centered around Emacs. Torstein Johansen has an interesting post on his workflow. Johansen describes his hardware and OS environment (a Thinkpad with 2 external screens running … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Rust vs. Go

Posted on 2017-01-19 by jcs

As most of you probably know, Eric Raymond (ESR) is part of an effort to rewrite the Network Time Protocol (NTP) suite to be smaller and more secure. You can follow the project’s progress on their blog. The NTP daemon … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment