Category Archives: General

The New Luddites Come for Our Spellcheckers

Posted on 2020-12-18 by jcs

Well, not for our spellcheckers but, even worse, our children’s spellcheckers. It was inevitable, of course. The new Luddites will take aim at anything that makes our lives easier and wasn’t used down on the farm 150 years ago. Meghan … Continue reading →

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Letting Google Control Your Home

Posted on 2020-12-17 by jcs

My immediate reaction when I saw this: Why would you give @Google control over anything in your home? https://t.co/4OwqMRTgM9 — Geoffrey Miller (@primalpoly) December 16, 2020 was absolute agreement. Why would anyone entrust Google with their home lighting? It’s the … Continue reading →

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Bit By Bit?

Posted on 2020-12-15 by jcs

Speaking of screaming from all sides, here’s a warning for those of you who are open source advocates and VS Code users. Microsoft has released a new LSP server for Python. The server is for VS Code and Microsoft says … Continue reading →

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More Batteries

Posted on 2020-12-14 by jcs

Karthik Chikmagalur is back with another post in his Batteries Included with Emacs series. This post, More Batteries Included with Emacs, is the second and last of his posts on little known features of vanilla Emacs. His first post in … Continue reading →

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Unlimited Storage for Life

Posted on 2020-12-13 by jcs

Irreal often posts about the absolute necessity to keep your data under your control. If you commit it to some “Internet service,” sooner or later it will become unavailable. The Stay Sassy blog has a very interesting post on why … Continue reading →

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Sorting with Regular Expressions

Posted on 2020-12-12 by jcs

Tory Anderson has a nice use case for the sort-regexp-fields command. When I first saw his post I thought sort-regexp-fields was another new find for me. But on checking, I discovered that I had used in back in 2011 in … Continue reading →

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Bozhidar Batsov’s Favorite Packages

Posted on 2020-12-11 by jcs

We all have our favorite Emacs packages. I’ve written about mine a few times (1, 2, 3). A few packages make almost everyone’s list. There’s Magit and Org-mode, of course. Many people say at least one of those is the … Continue reading →

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Threading Macros in Elisp

Posted on 2020-12-10 by jcs

As I’ve mentioned in some recent posts, Mike Zamansky is making his annual pilgrimage to the Advent of Code Website to try his hand at the problems. This year—so far, at least—he’s been using Clojure to solve the problems. I … Continue reading →

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This Is Tech Journalism

Posted on 2020-12-09 by jcs

Even casual readers know that Irreal holds a generally dim view of journalists. But this isn’t another post about their bias and ignorance of their subject matter. This is a post about silliness masquerading as serious journalism. It’s about writing … Continue reading →

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The Social Life of Forests

Posted on 2020-12-08 by jcs

With a couple of exceptions—like Dawkins’ /The Selfish Gene/—Biology has never held the fascination for me that many other subjects do. Nonetheless, I was drawn to The New York Times Magazine article, The Social Life of Forests. The TL;DR is … Continue reading →

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