Category Archives: General

Setting The Timezone In Emacs

Posted on 2026-11-14 by jcs

Charles Choi has a nice hint for those of you who travel and phone home with Emacs. Here’s the situation: you are travelling and log into your home server with SSH and emacsclient. It’s wonderful. Just like being at home … Continue reading →

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AI Use At Irreal: There Isn’t Any

Posted on 2026-11-13 by jcs

Some people say there isn’t intelligence of any sort in use. I don’t know about that but I do know that AI isn’t used by Irreal in any way. Despite my promiscuous use of em-dashes and refusal to believe that … Continue reading →

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Let Over Lambda Is Free To Read

Posted on 2026-11-12 by jcs

Doug Hoyte writes to say that’s he’s making his excellent book Let over Lambda available on line and as a PDF. I’ve written about the book several times most importantly here and here but you can search Irreal for “let … Continue reading →

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Journelly 1.5

Posted on 2026-11-11 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez just announced the release of Journelly 1.5. It’s the formal release of the beta version that I recently wrote about. I can’t say enough about this release. As I’ve said before, my Journelly database is over 4 thousand … Continue reading →

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Burnish

Posted on 2026-11-10 by jcs

If you do a lot of exporting from Org Mode and hate all the rigmarole involved, Charles Choi may have precisely what you need. He’s just released Burnish, an app that largely automates the Org export process. The TL;DR is … Continue reading →

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Emacs 31.1.90 Pretest

Posted on 2026-11-09 by jcs

More good news on the Emacs front. Sean Whitton writes to say that the Emacs 31.1.90 pretest is available. The Emacs point releases are generally to fix bugs and maybe refine an existing functionality but you shouldn’t expect any major … Continue reading →

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Terry Pratchett’s Study

Posted on 2026-11-08 by jcs

Today’s topic is a little outside the usual Irreal fare; I don’t even have an appropriate tag for it. It’s about a post concerning Terry Pratchett’s study. Not his actual study but a scale model of it built by hand … Continue reading →

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BYOK

Posted on 2026-11-07 by jcs

My ex-colleague and old friend Watts Martin has an interesting post about BYOK. BYOK is a “writer deck”, a device exclusively for writing that has no distracting apps or even a connection to the Internet. The idea is that writers … Continue reading →

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Why Use A Word Processor When You Have Org?

Posted on 2026-11-06 by jcs

Over at And now it’s all this, Dr Drang has a post on using TextEdit versus using Pages. He’s a Mac user, obviously, but that doesn’t matter so much. The real argument is over whether one should use a word … Continue reading →

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The CEO As A Nerd

Posted on 2026-11-05 by jcs

I’ve been sitting on a post by John Gruber entitled SHOULD A CEO BE A NERD ABOUT THEIR COMPANY’S PRODUCTS? Gruber talks about a post from Ben Schlappig that talks about Airline CEOs and their knowledge of their competitors’ offerings. … Continue reading →

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