Category Archives: General

Displaying Org-mode Notifications Natively on MacOS

Posted on 2019-12-14 by jcs

As many of you know, I live happily in the Apple Ecosystem but do virtually everything that doesn’t involve the browser in Emacs. One exception is my calendar. Events like “Renew ACM membership” or “Research ways of doing \(X\)” are … Continue reading →

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Strategies for Remote Work

Posted on 2019-12-13 by jcs

Ever since I read Mike Elgan’s article on The New Bedouins back in 2007, I’ve been fascinated by the idea of remote work. These days, remote work is commonplace and becoming more so but in 2007 it was an impossible … Continue reading →

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Building a Personal Knowledge Base

Posted on 2019-12-12 by jcs

I’m a big believer in collecting and storing information: in building a personal knowledge base if you like. I do this, of course, with Org-mode but that’s not the only possibility. Sung Cho has a nice post in which he … Continue reading →

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Keeping An Open Access Site Online

Posted on 2019-12-11 by jcs

I’ve written several times about the renegade pirate sites that curate scientific papers and make them available for free (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Their actions are clearly illegal and some say immoral but they’re a useful corrective to … Continue reading →

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How to Alias Car and Cdr and Why You Probably Shouldn’t

Posted on 2019-12-10 by jcs

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the minor controversy concerning the names of the Lisp functions car and cdr. Some people, mostly non-Lispers but also some who use Lisp, dislike the names and think they should be changed … Continue reading →

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How To Wrap The MacBook Power Cord

Posted on 2019-12-09 by jcs

While learning how to pour organge juice, I stumbled on a video that shows you the right way to wrap your MacBook power cord into a small neat package that fits easily in your backpack: Here’s another video that shows … Continue reading →

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Car and Cdr versus Head and Tail

Posted on 2019-12-08 by jcs

Right after parentheses, one of the things about Lisp that non-Lispers—and even some Lispers—like to complain about are the names of the two functions car and cdr. A common understanding is that car returns the first entry of a list … Continue reading →

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BPF: A New Type of Software

Posted on 2019-12-07 by jcs

When I first saw the title of Brendan Gregg’s blog post—reproduced above—I had a small frisson of annoyance. BPF (aka Berkeley Packet Filter) has been around since 1992 as the kernel interface to tcpdump and here was Gregg appropriating the … Continue reading →

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Techie Luddites

Posted on 2019-12-06 by jcs

Those of you who have been around Irreal for a while know that one of my favorite hobby horses is the new luddites. These are mostly humorless folks who imagine that the rest of us share their psychoses and who, … Continue reading →

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The Myth of the Young Entrepreneur

Posted on 2019-12-05 by jcs

One of geekdom’s most cherished beliefs—especially among young hackers—is that of the 20 year old who comes up with a new idea, builds it into a fabulously successful business, sells it for millions after a few years, and retires a … Continue reading →

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