Author Archives: jcs

Another Reason To Use An Ad Blocker

Posted on 2026-08-05 by jcs

Long term Irreal readers know that I’ve always been ambivalent about ad blockers. On the one hand, many Web sites that provide content need to make money to survive and the only generally effective way of doing that is through … Continue reading →

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I 🩷 RSS

Posted on 2026-08-04 by jcs

I don’t use social media. Why would I? Who wants some algorithm telling you what to read and filtering your own content? What I do like is RSS. You see messages about all the content from all the sites you’re … Continue reading →

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The Em Dash And Emacs

Posted on 2026-08-03 by jcs

Irreal, as you all know, is an em-dash friendly site. Irreal has always liked them and now we like them even more because it puts a thumb in the eye of those mentally challenged folks who claim, erroneously, that “real … Continue reading →

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Lisp Dialects Compared

Posted on 2026-08-02 by jcs

Elia Scotto has an excellent post on the major Lisp dialects. There are, of course, several Lisp flavors and while they share many features—including, more or less, syntax—there are nevertheless differences that make the choice of which one to use … Continue reading →

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Apple Advertising

Posted on 2026-08-01 by jcs

This week, I came across a couple of posts feeding my new hobby horse: Apple’s descent into advertising. Like almost everyone else, I HATE, HATE, HATE having ads pop up when I’m trying to do something else. It’s bad enough … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: The Scourge Of Dickovers

Posted on 2026-07-31 by jcs

Over at Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow has a righteous diatribe about dickovers. If you’re not familiar with the term, dickover was coined by John Gruber to describe those super annoying popups that cover the text you’re trying to read. They’re bad … Continue reading →

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Turning Two Spaces Into A New Sentence

Posted on 2026-07-30 by jcs

In the Apple ecosphere—especially in iOS—a convenient short cut is to type two spaces to end the current sentence and start a new one. Specifically, two spaces will delete the spaces, insert a period and a space, and capitalize the … Continue reading →

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Folding In Non-Org Buffers

Posted on 2026-07-29 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) really likes being able to cycle folding in Org buffers. Of course, then he wanted to be able to do the same thing in any buffer. In particular, he wanted to be able to fold and unfold … Continue reading →

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A Quick EWW Hack

Posted on 2026-07-28 by jcs

I’ve been writing a bit lately about my growing use of EWW [1, 2, 3, 4]. I was always a little skeptical of those who said they made significant use of EWW for their browsing but then I realized that … Continue reading →

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Embark For CIDER & Projectile

Posted on 2026-07-27 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov, who’s been writing about Embark lately has a nice post on integrating CIDER and Projectile into Embark. I don’t use either of them so you might wonder why I care. The answer is that Batsov’s post is a … Continue reading →

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