Author Archives: jcs

Organizing A Book In Org Mode

Posted on 2024-10-15 by jcs

Somehow, I missed this great reference to Ron Galloway’s outline for using Org mode to organize a book. Fortunately, Sacha had me covered with her excellent Emacs News. If you haven’t written a book before, it may be surprising how … Continue reading →

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Unique Card Decks Revisited

Posted on 2024-10-14 by jcs

Five years ago, I wrote about an interesting factoid that Paul Graham posted (probably to Twitter) concerning how many unique orderings of a standard 52 playing card deck there are. Almost all Irreal readers will immediately raise their hands shouting, … Continue reading →

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The Downside Of Living A Digital Life

Posted on 2024-10-13 by jcs

Regular readers know that for several years I’ve been endeavoring to live a “digital life”. What that means—more or less—is eschewing pencil and paper, paper bills, checks, dead tree books, physical credit cards, and even things like keys when I … Continue reading →

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Milton After Action Report

Posted on 2024-10-12 by jcs

Here I am. We just got power back today at 15:19. We did have broadband—although the signal was weak—but I didn’t have enough power on my laptop to compose a reasonable post. As you might imagine, everyone we know in … Continue reading →

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Writing With Emacs Redux

Posted on 2024-10-09 by jcs

Four years ago I wrote about James Gill’s list of Emacs resources for writers. It was a curated list of resources that addressed writing prose of various sorts with Emacs. In April, I revisited the list. Judging from what I … Continue reading →

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Milton Outage Alert

Posted on 2024-10-08 by jcs

Sigh. This is yet another warning of an impending Irreal outage due to a hurricane. This time it’s Milton, which intensified very rapidly into a Cat 5 hurricane. There are two very bad pieces of news for the Irreal Bunker. … Continue reading →

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Emacs Configuration Can Be Easy

Posted on 2024-10-07 by jcs

A frequent complaint we hear from n00bs is that Emacs out of the box is unusable, that it’s really hard to configure, and so you need something like Doom to get going. Generations of Emacs users have put the lie … Continue reading →

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Why You Still Don’t Mess Around With Jim

Posted on 2024-10-06 by jcs

I’ve written before about the dangers of messing around with Jim [1, 2]. The reference is to a wonderful Jim Croce song explaining the dangers of messing around with a bad man by the name of Big Jim Walker. The … Continue reading →

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Commercial Surveillance: Out Of Control

Posted on 2024-10-05 by jcs

It’s been a while since the minions and I indulged ourselves in a good privacy rant. You can consider that remedied with this post. The EFF is reporting the results of an FTC report on how companies abuse their users’ … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Is Lisp Syntax Boring

Posted on 2024-10-04 by jcs

Wait. What? Is Lisp syntax boring? My immediate response is, “Of course it is.” That’s its strength. Lisp doesn’t have much syntax so unlike other languages you can immediately start using the language without having to worry about learning a … Continue reading →

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