Category Archives: General

More on Webster’s Revised Dictionary

Posted on 2022-01-08 by jcs

Last week, in Draft 4 Revisited, I remembered James Somers’ wonderful article on You’re probably using the wrong dictionary. The right dictionary, it turns out, is Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913 + 1828) but you really need to read Somers’ … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Unix in the Browser

Posted on 2022-01-07 by jcs

No. Just No. Semiserious afterword I get that there’s some great engineering behind this but why would you want to “run” Unix in the browser? And why, in the name of all that’s holy, would you want an OS built … Continue reading →

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Finding Repeated Words

Posted on 2022-01-06 by jcs

Years ago, Albert Heinle was writing his thesis. A common error that many or most writers must deal with is using the same word repeatedly in close proximity. I certainly do and so did Heinle. He was using Emacs and … Continue reading →

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Is Norton Stealth Downloading a Cryptocurrency Miner?

Posted on 2022-01-05 by jcs

I just saw this horrifying Twitter thread. The thread makes it appear that Norton is stealthily downloading a cryptocurrency miner and running it without user consent. Instant outrage! Except It’s Twitter If true this would almost certainly be illegal and … Continue reading →

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Another Look At Counting Org Tags

Posted on 2022-01-04 by jcs

Andrea over at Where parallels cross has decided to post some shorter tips in addition to the blog’s longer offerings. The first is some Elisp to count the number of tags in your agenda files. When I looked at the … Continue reading →

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Are Google Searches Losing Quality?

Posted on 2022-01-03 by jcs

As most of you know, I try to avoid Google as much as possible. In particular, I haven’t used the Google search engine in years. But that’s because of privacy concerns and Google’s sordid record of vacuuming up as much … Continue reading →

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Germany Gets It Right

Posted on 2022-01-02 by jcs

Tutanota is a Germany-based secure email provider. As you would expect, they are very interested in privacy-affecting legislation, especially in Germany, so they were quick to announce a change in government policy regarding data retention on their blog. The TL;DR … Continue reading →

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Draft 4 Revisited

Posted on 2022-01-01 by jcs

It’s New Years day and a lot of you are probably in no mind for an over stimulating rant on one of Irreal’s hobby horses or perhaps even a technical discussion so, instead, I offer a reprise of one of … Continue reading →

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Emacs 28, Menus, and Mice

Posted on 2021-12-31 by jcs

Philip Kaludercic has an interesting post on the new Emacs 28 context menu feature. It has some useful information on how to use and configure the feature. The TL;DR is that you can configure menus to be context sensitive. For … Continue reading →

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Finite Automata State Diagrams With Tikz

Posted on 2021-12-30 by jcs

I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite implementation techniques is finite state machines. I started using them for communication protocol implementations but soon discovered that they could be applied to several sorts of problems. It’s easy enough to sketch … Continue reading →

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