Category Archives: General

Red Meat Friday: Duck Duck Go and Microsoft

Posted on 2022-06-03 by jcs

There’s been a huge number of hot takes—mostly on twitter, of course, but elsewhere as well—about Duck Duck Go (DDG) not blocking Microsoft tracking scripts. The hot takes all treat the matter as a betrayal of DDG’s users and express … Continue reading →

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Making Emacs Modern

Posted on 2022-06-02 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov has a post on one of my favorite hobbyhorses: making Emacs more modern. I’ve written about this several times. See here and here for example. Batsov is not sympathetic either. As Batsov notes, almost all these proposed modernizations … Continue reading →

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A Clueless Journalist on Apple’s Self Repair Program

Posted on 2022-06-01 by jcs

Long time readers know that Irreal doesn’t hold journalists in high regard. Oddly, the worst offenders are journalists on the tech beat. It’s odd because you’d expect them to know the difference between a computer and a composter but they … Continue reading →

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Elisp Cheat Sheet

Posted on 2022-05-31 by jcs

Wow! This post from Mickey is something I had no idea about. In Emacs 28, there’s a builtin cheat sheet for Elisp functions. You call shortdoc-display-group and are presented with a list of categories or “groups”. When you choose a … Continue reading →

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Creative Writing With Emacs

Posted on 2022-05-30 by jcs

If you’ve been around Irreal for a while you know that I love reading about how people are using Emacs for non-engineering/scientific purposes such as creative writing. It’s hardly a surprise that creative writers, for example, find Emacs a superb … Continue reading →

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The EFF Announces the End of Life for HTTPS Everywhere

Posted on 2022-05-29 by jcs

The EFF has announced the end of life for their HTTPS Everywhere program. This might seems like a bad thing but it isn’t. The EFF says that their browser extension is no longer needed because all the major browsers now … Continue reading →

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Crazy Mode

Posted on 2022-05-28 by jcs

As a follow on to my discussions of Mickey’s posts about Hippie Expand and abbrev, Mohammed Sadiq has a post on his Crazy Mode project. It’s another completion framework that is aimed at providing efficient shortcuts when you’re coding. Take … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Ties

Posted on 2022-05-27 by jcs

This is barely Red Meat Friday material because almost everyone here will agree with it and find it noncontroversial. Nonetheless, the minions assure me that there are plenty of suits in our industry who will object strenuously. The issue is … Continue reading →

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Leslie Lamport

Posted on 2022-05-26 by jcs

Most of you probably know Leslie Lamport as the original author of LaTeX but within the computer science community, he’s mostly known for his work on distributed systems. Like Knuth, Lamport was trained as a mathematician but rather than pursue … Continue reading →

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Emacs, Xwidgets, and macOS

Posted on 2022-05-25 by jcs

As I’ve written many times, the only non-Emacs application that gets any significant use on my computer is Safari. If I could find a way of putting Safari’s functionality into Emacs, I’d be very close to never having to leave … Continue reading →

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