Author Archives: jcs

A Hyper Key on Any USB Keyboard

Posted on 2016-04-18 by jcs

Grant Rettke over at Wisdom and Wonder has a useful post on how to get a 【Hyper】 key on any USB keyboard. As Rettke says, the 【Hyper】 key is the last modifier that’s available almost exclusively for users. My Emacs … Continue reading →

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The Demise of Midrange Computers

Posted on 2016-04-17 by jcs

Eric Raymond (ESR) has an interesting post on the death of midrange computers. Some time ago he predicted that in the future we would all carry around smartphone-derived computers in our pockets and plug them into stationary keyboard/screen/pointer devices that … Continue reading →

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Fingerprint Sensors Really Do Improve Security

Posted on 2016-04-16 by jcs

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a ProgrammableWeb article positing that biometric sensors decrease security. I made the case that unless you were a criminal with incriminating information on your phone, that was incorrect. I went on to … Continue reading →

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Why You Should Never Listen to the Media About Security

Posted on 2016-04-15 by jcs

Irreal, as you probably know, how a dim view of the effectiveness, among other things, of the media. This is particularly true of the technical press, of course, but also holds for the more main stream traditional press. Case in … Continue reading →

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Some Comment-DWIM Tricks

Posted on 2016-04-14 by jcs

Raimon Grau over at puntoblogspot has a really useful quick tip on a couple of comment-dwim features that I didn’t know about. He shows how to Comment out a blank line. Remove an inline comment. If you use comment-dwim (bound … Continue reading →

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Debugging

Posted on 2016-04-13 by jcs

Via Jean-Philippe Paradis. So true. I remember debugging a problem that disappeared as soon as I put a printf in the code to see what was happening. Typical code debugging. pic.twitter.com/z764dhyJ5Z — Ryan Houdek (@sonicadvance1) March 5, 2016

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An Example of Why Reproducible Research Matters

Posted on 2016-04-12 by jcs

Dennis Ogbe, whom I’ve written about before, has a nice example of why reproducible research matters. If you’ve read those previous posts you know that Ogbe is a PhD student in Electrical Engineering at Purdue. As such he reads papers … Continue reading →

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Using Org Mode Displays for Presentations

Posted on 2016-04-11 by jcs

If you’ve watched any of Howard Abrams’ excellent videos, you may have wondered, as others have, how he gets the nice effects when he displays Org buffers. Wonder no more. Abrams has posted an explanation of how he gets those … Continue reading →

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A Reminder from Kontra

Posted on 2016-04-10 by jcs

Enough is enough, California. My quarterly reminder to citizens of California: you'll be held responsible for Dianne Feinstein. — Kontra (@counternotions) April 9, 2016

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75 Free Privacy Tools

Posted on 2016-04-10 by jcs

Richard Patterson wrote to me about my article on privacy tools and suggested I take a look at his offering, 75+ free tools to protect your privacy online. As Patterson says, you won’t need all these tools but you should … Continue reading →

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