Author Archives: jcs

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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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NSA Recap

Posted on 2013-11-06 by jcs

The Guardian, which has done almost all the heavy lifting on the ongoing NSA story, has an excellent recapitulation of the story so far and what it means for us. The page is interactive and has snippets of video interviews … Continue reading →

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Sacha Chats with Magnar Sveen

Posted on 2013-11-05 by jcs

Sacha Chua continues her series of chats with Emacs luminaries by interviewing Magnar Sveen. Sveen, of course, is the producer of the highly regarded Emacs Rocks! videos as well as the author of such Emacs packages as Expand Region, Multiple … Continue reading →

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From the Department of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Posted on 2013-11-04 by jcs

How could they think this was acceptable?

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