Author Archives: jcs

Practical Engineering

Posted on 2026-09-23 by jcs

A while ago, a new site popped up in my feed. That site was Practical Engineering. I didn’t know how it got into my feed until I started to write this post. When I checked, I discovered that I was … Continue reading →

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The Replacement Continues

Posted on 2026-09-22 by jcs

I’ve written several times before—the latest time here— about the pernicious effect that advertising can have on a company. I’m not talking about a company advertising itself and its products. Rather, I’m referring to the increasingly common practice of allowing … Continue reading →

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Unicode Version 18.0

Posted on 2026-09-21 by jcs

I’ve always been awed by Unicode and in particular its UTF-8 encoding that does the seemingly impossible: representing virtually every possible character in every language while still being compatible with ASCII. That means that UTF-8 text containing only the “standard” … Continue reading →

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D2 For Diagrams In Emacs

Posted on 2026-09-20 by jcs

You know how people have little “eternal quests” like searching for the perfect wallet, or the perfect t-shirt, or whatever? One of mine is the perfect app for making diagrams in Emacs and Org-mode. My go to solution is Graphviz, … Continue reading →

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More From Watts On Markdown

Posted on 2026-09-19 by jcs

My friend Watts Martin is back with some additional thoughts on Markdown. A year ago he wrote a post complaining about the ankle biters who claim you can’t do serious writing with Markdown. I responded positively to his post and … Continue reading →

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Improving Emacs Long Lines Performance

Posted on 2026-09-18 by jcs

James Cherti has another excellent post in his series exploring Emacs optimizations. This one discusses improving Emacs performance on files with long lines. As those of you who have to deal with long lines know, Emacs doesn’t handle them very … Continue reading →

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Twenty Five Years Is Enough

Posted on 2026-09-17 by jcs

Twenty five years of what? As Bruce Schneier says, 25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough. The post at the link is a long article with Cindy Cohn that originally appeared in Lawfare. It’s a long look at how mass … Continue reading →

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The Org Editor

Posted on 2026-09-16 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, Low_Money_633 has a paean to Org mode. That’s nothing new, of course. Many of us are long time, devout Org mode fans. What struck me about Low_Money_633’s praise was his description of it as “the … Continue reading →

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How To Speed Up Emacs Terminals

Posted on 2026-09-15 by jcs

Another great post from James Cherti. This one’s about speeding up Emacs terminal emulators. As Cherti says, Emacs terminals can be slow especially when they get pounded with a lot of output. He offers some suggestions to help. Those changes … Continue reading →

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PSA: Homebrew Updated To Version 7.0.0

Posted on 2026-09-14 by jcs

If you’re a macOS user, you probably know about Homebrew, a repository of easy to install apps and libraries. I use it all the time because it’s so much easier than hunting up all the dependencies required for compiling them … Continue reading →

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