Author Archives: jcs

List Character Sets

Posted on 2013-11-15 by jcs

I picked up a useful Emacs command from Xah Lee’s Emacs Blog. It’s from a comment by Stef on Lee’s Emacs & Unicode Tips page. It’s the list-character-sets command. When you call it, you get a list of all the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Cursive Coda

Posted on 2013-11-14 by jcs

I’ve written quite a few posts about the horror that is cursive handwriting. The gist of those posts were that I stopped writing in cursive as soon as I could Cursive handwriting is dying out Those posts stand up pretty … Continue reading →

Posted in General | 2 Comments

Update on Slow Loading of Irreal

Posted on 2013-11-13 by jcs

A quick update on the Irreal loading problems. I ran a tcpdump on a typical page load of Irreal and discovered the following: The initial three-way handshake with the server completes almost immediately. Immediately afterwards the GET from the browser … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging | Tagged | 5 Comments

Ten Steps You Can Take to Protect Yourself from Surveillance

Posted on 2013-11-12 by jcs

The EFF has a list of ten steps you can take to protect yourself from surveillance. There’s nothing there that will come as news to the always informed Irreal reader but it’s a nice summary and worth passing on to … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Gnus Video Part 3

Posted on 2013-11-11 by jcs

Noufal Ibrahim over at EmacsMovies.org has his latest video up. It’s the third on his series about Gnus. In this episode, Ibrahim discusses the scoring and sorting of articles. Like almost everything in Gnus it’s extraordinarily configurable and therefore complex. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Dark Mail Alliance

Posted on 2013-11-10 by jcs

Here’s some rare good news from the NSA front: the Lavabit and Silent Circle teams have joined forces to form the Dark Mail Alliance. There are quite a few stories on the Internet about the alliance and what they are … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Help: Irreal Loading Slowly

Posted on 2013-11-09 by jcs

For the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed that Irreal has been loading slowly. Irreal, like many small WordPress blogs, runs on a virtual server and I assumed that my hosting provider was moving things around a bit and that … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging | Tagged | 10 Comments

The New Apple Mail App and GPGTools

Posted on 2013-11-09 by jcs

The other day I got a popup telling me that a new version of the OS X mail app was available to download and install. I like to keep everything up-to-date as much as possible so I clicked on “Install.” … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Newlines in Lisp Mode

Posted on 2013-11-08 by jcs

I was lurking in a Twitter conversation between Jean-Philippe Paradis and Xah Lee and learned something new and useful. If you’re using Paredit mode, as you should be, there is a difference between 【Return】 and 【Ctrl+j】. I have 【Return】 set … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | 10 Comments

SBCL 1.1.13

Posted on 2013-11-07 by jcs

I forgot to mention that SBCL 1.1.13 is out and ready for download. There are some bug fixes, a few minor enhancements, and a couple of optimizations for SXHASH. You can check the release notes to see exactly what’s changed. … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment