Category Archives: General

The Law of Unintended Consequences

Posted on 2020-09-27 by jcs

I find this hilarious: Brilliant: When the euro bank notes were designed, they used European-style bridges which were *non-existing*, not to have to choose between countries. The Dutch town of Spijkenisse claimed them all for the Netherlands by building them … Continue reading →

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Document Preparation with Org, LaTeX, and Docker

Posted on 2020-09-26 by jcs

Marco Ieni was tired of working with Microsoft Word so he he built a workflow that uses Org mode for document preparation. Irreal readers know he won’t be getting any arguments here. Even putting aside the brain-dead Word UI there … Continue reading →

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Blocking Melpa

Posted on 2020-09-25 by jcs

Here’s a mystery to entertain you as you segue into the weekend. Jerror was complaining on the Emacs subredit that their university had blocked MELPA. What?!? Why in the world would anyone block MELPA? It doesn’t appear to be one … Continue reading →

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Doom for N00bs

Posted on 2020-09-24 by jcs

Derek Taylor has an interesting take on learning Doom Emacs. Most immigrants to Doom are coming from Vim or are Emacs users who need the more ergonomic evil keybindings because of RSI problems. But, says Taylor, some people coming to … Continue reading →

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Zamansky 75: Bufler

Posted on 2020-09-23 by jcs

Mike Zamansky has added another video to his Using Emacs Series. This time it’s about bufler, a replacement for ibuffer. Mostly when I call up ibuffer, I just want to see a list of my buffers and I don’t care … Continue reading →

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Taking Notes By Hand

Posted on 2020-09-22 by jcs

Longtime readers know that Irreal is, um, skeptical of most studies put out by the psychology community. They are, largely, not reproducible and often just silly. One finding that is popular among psychologists that that note-taking is more effective when … Continue reading →

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Binder for Your Writing Projects

Posted on 2020-09-21 by jcs

When writers ask for software suggestions, one of the most frequent recommendations I see—other than the evil whose name must not be uttered—is Scrivener. The idea is that you can write in any order you like and keep project notes … Continue reading →

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Panic’s Nova Editor

Posted on 2020-09-20 by jcs

My friend Watts has been wandering around in the editor wilderness for the almost 20 years that I’ve known him. He’s used them all: Vim, Emacs, BBEdit, TextMate, VS Code, Sublime Text, and probably any other editor you’ve ever heard … Continue reading →

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Leveraging Emacs Introspection

Posted on 2020-09-19 by jcs

James Cash has an instructive video that shows how to leverage Emacs introspection to solves problems or make simple changes. Cash doesn’t like the way Return behaves when the point is on a list item. The default behavior is simply … Continue reading →

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Online Voting and Banking

Posted on 2020-09-17 by jcs

There are, I’m sure, no Irreal readers who don’t understand that online voting is a really hard problem and that, currently, there are no good solutions. Those without a technical background don’t understand this and ask questions like, “If we … Continue reading →

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