Author Archives: jcs

Why LaTeX is Better Than Word

Posted on 2015-11-24 by jcs

Many of you are aware, doubtlessly to your sorrow, of my many rants about Word and its evil brethren. If you care—and you should—what your finished writing looks like, you shouldn’t be using Word. Journals and publishers who generate printing … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged LaTeX | Leave a comment

Mass Surveillance

Posted on 2015-11-23 by jcs

The New York Times editorial board has a nice editorial on why mass surveillance is not the answer to terrorism. Like the New Yorker article that I wrote about yesterday, the Times calls out Brennan and Clapper for their past … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Privacy | Leave a comment

Paris and Crypto Panic

Posted on 2015-11-22 by jcs

After the tragedy and outrage in Paris last week, the usual suspects are running around saying, “See? This is what happens when things go dark.” Except, of course, there’s no evidence that the perpetrators used encryption and plenty of indications … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Privacy | Leave a comment

Gnus on Windows

Posted on 2015-11-21 by jcs

As most Emacers know, two of the most difficult things involving Emacs are Getting it to work well on Windows, and Configuring and using Gnus. So, of course, Sacha Chua decided to do both at the same time. In the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | 2 Comments

Asynchronous Python in Org Mode

Posted on 2015-11-20 by jcs

John Kitchin is so busy turning out little Emacs jewels it’s a wonder he has any time to do Chemical Engineering. Of course, most of those jewels are in the service of solving problems with his research and his latest … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs, Org-mode | Leave a comment

Chris Wellons on Emacs and RSA

Posted on 2015-11-19 by jcs

Chris Wellons likes to make Emacs do unexpected things (see 1, 2, and 3 for instance). His latest example is an implementation of the RSA public key algorithm in Emacs Calc. It’s only a toy implementation, of course, but the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Calc, Emacs | Leave a comment

Moving Through Edits

Posted on 2015-11-18 by jcs

Ben Maughan over at Pragmatic Emacs points to a useful package that lets you move back and forwards through editing changes. It’s implemented in the Goto Chg package. The easiest way of thinking about it is that it behaves like … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | Leave a comment

John Wiegley on Haskell

Posted on 2015-11-17 by jcs

Almost every serious Emacser knows by now that John Wiegley has taken over as the Emacs maintainer. Everyone appears united in their belief that this is a good thing and that Wiegley will be a great maintainer. As you’d expect, … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged Haskell | 1 Comment

PDF Tools for Emacs

Posted on 2015-11-16 by jcs

Over at Thoughts on Code and History, Matt Price has a nice post on Note Taking with PDF Tools and Emacs. PDF Tools is a replacement for DocView but with extended capabilities. Rather than build the PDF image in the … Continue reading →

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

Capture Web Pages as an Org Structure

Posted on 2015-11-15 by jcs

The other day, I wrote about using lynx to capture a Web page as text. Later, No Thanks had another, better, suggestion @arghwhy Nice! fetch HTML into its #OrgMode structure, not just text. Thanks. — Mike Sample (@mikesample) November 12, … Continue reading →