Category Archives: General

The Guile Hacker’s Handbook

Posted on 2021-01-07 by jcs

Jeremy Korwin has an interesting project underway. He’s writing a Guile hacker’s handbook. Guile, of course, is the official GNU extension language. Korwin’s idea is to document what a beginning Guile hacker needs to know to install, and learn the … Continue reading →

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Building A Password Generator in 3 Minutes

Posted on 2021-01-06 by jcs

Today—the whole week really—has been consumed by yak shaving so this is a short offering. Salah Qadri has a nice 3 minute video (3 minutes, 48 secs actually) in which he builds a reasonably good password generator. The generator builds … Continue reading →

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Why You Should Learn Emacs This Year

Posted on 2021-01-05 by jcs

David Wilson over at the System Crafters YouTube channel is starting off the year with a video that gives you 5 Reasons to Learn Emacs in 2021. He begins by noting that Emacs is not a text editor or at … Continue reading →

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Adtech Fraud at Uber

Posted on 2021-01-04 by jcs

As most of you know to your sorrow, I really, really hate adtech and frequently rail against it. The harm they do to ordinary users like you and me is manifest. They invade our privacy, follow us around the Internet, … Continue reading →

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Tangling Dotfiles From an Org File

Posted on 2021-01-02 by jcs

Despite the XDG base directory specification, configuration files are still stored all over our file systems. If you have a single machine, maintaining those files is not too much trouble—they’re almost all “set it and forget it”—but when you have … Continue reading →

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Abo-abo on Org-Roam

Posted on 2021-01-01 by jcs

Regular readers know that I’m very taken with the Zettelkasten idea and have implemented my own (sort of) Zettelkasten with Org-mode. My homegrown solution is not very featureful or convenient so I installed org-roam (a FOSS alternative to the popular … Continue reading →

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Happy New Year

Posted on 2020-12-31 by jcs

There’s not much happening today so I’m going to settle for wishing all Irreal readers a very Happy New Year from the Minions and me.

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A Global Hyper Key

Posted on 2020-12-30 by jcs

There’s an interesting article over at Prodtyping that illustrates how to implement a global Hyper key on the Mac. By “global” I mean it works everywhere, not just Emacs. The idea is to use Hyper as a global shortcut key. … Continue reading →

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Emacs FAQ

Posted on 2020-12-29 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, okimka suggests that an Emacs FAQ for the subreddit would be a good idea and even suggests a few questions and their answers. The comments generally complained about the questions and some of the answers … Continue reading →

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More on Emacs and the Unix Way

Posted on 2020-12-28 by jcs

Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) just put up an interesting post that serves as a nice coda to yesterday’s Irreal post, Emacs As a 2D CLI. His take is not so much that Emacs fits nicely into the Unix paradigm but that … Continue reading →

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