Author Archives: jcs

Emacs for Prose

Posted on 2016-04-24 by jcs

I just came across a tweet pointing to an old post by Urpo Lankinen about using Emacs for writing prose. I’m always interested in that topic so I followed the link and read the post. It seemed vaguely familiar—especially with … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs, Org-mode | 2 Comments

FISA Abandons the Fourth Amendment (Again)

Posted on 2016-04-23 by jcs

Remember how I told you and told you and told you and told you and told you about the Iron Law of Data Collection? That no matter what the government says or promises, data, once collected, will find other uses … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Privacy | Leave a comment

Blogging with Org Mode and Nikola

Posted on 2016-04-22 by jcs

I’ve written before about using Jekyll as a blogging engine (1, 2). It’s a nice solution but it’s not the only one. Mike Zamansky was using Jekyll but didn’t like that he had to maintain a Ruby development environment on … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging | Tagged Emacs, Org-mode | 1 Comment

How to Keep Emacs Running Across an X Crash

Posted on 2016-04-21 by jcs

If you’re running a Linux system and sometimes experience an X crash, Sacha has some advice on how to keep Emacs running. Emacs is notoriously slow to start, of course, and that alone is reason enough to be annoyed when … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | 1 Comment

Which Key

Posted on 2016-04-20 by jcs

Recently, I came across this reddit post on which-key. I think Sacha mentioned it in one of her weekly Emacs News posts too. The post reminded me that Kaushal Modi had recommended that I try it out after I’d mentioned … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | Leave a comment

European Quotation Marks

Posted on 2016-04-19 by jcs

I know about the French guillemets but being from North America I had no idea how varied punctuation marks are. Here’s an interesting summary of European quotation marks. Quotation marks in Europe map pic.twitter.com/xLmmajFHql — Andrey Sitnik (@andreysitnik) February 25, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | 1 Comment

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 →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | 5 Comments

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 →

Posted in General | Tagged Tech | 2 Comments

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 →

Posted in General | Tagged Security | Leave a comment

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 →