Author Archives: jcs

What Does It Take? (European Edition)

Just in case those of you in Europe think that you don’t have reason to be as mad as Americans should be, you might want to reconsider.

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An Easy EmacsGolf Challenge

Here’s an easy EmacsGolf challenge that came up today. I have an org file in which some of the headings have a check mark (✓) at the beginning of the heading (but after the stars). The file is quite long … Continue reading

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GPG/PGP Best Practices

The Privacy and Authenticity Outreach Workgroup of we.riseup.net have published an excellent list of OpenPGP Best Practices. Most Irreal readers, I trust, have already installed and configured GPG/PGP even if most of their usual correspondents haven’t. I’ve written before that … Continue reading

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The Iron Law of Data Collection Confirmed

Just in case you needed more proof of the iron law of data collection, consider this McClatchyDC story about how almost 5000 people had their personal information swept up and shared with nearly 30 federal agencies because they ordered a … Continue reading

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What Does It Take?

Are you angry yet? How about now?1 Footnotes: 1 To be fair, there’s some controversy associated with this claim and it doesn’t even seem possible—given that Linux is open source—until you remember the greatest hack of all time.

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On Open Space Offices and Idiots

A few days ago, Michael Flowersky wrote a blog post that asked the question, What’s the difference between an advocate of open space office and an Idiot? It was an amusing read but I wasn’t going to comment on it … Continue reading

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Delay Update

Just a quick note to bring you up to date on my efforts to fix the slow page loading that’s been plaguing Irreal lately. As I mentioned in my last update, the problem appears to be page generation not server … Continue reading

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List Character Sets

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

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Cursive Coda

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

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Update on Slow Loading of Irreal

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

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