Category Archives: General

Unix V4 Update

Posted on 2025-12-24 by jcs

A month and a half ago, I wrote about the discovery of an original Unix V4 tape in a storeroom at the University of Utah. V4 was special because it was the first version of Unix to be largely written … Continue reading →

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Journelly 1.3

Posted on 2025-12-23 by jcs

Good news for Journelly users. Álvaro Ramírez has just released version 1.3 of Journelly. If you’ve been around Irreal for anytime at all, you know that I am a huge fan of Journelly. It’s one of my most used iOS … Continue reading →

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Silliness We Tell Ourselves

Posted on 2025-12-22 by jcs

This should probably be a Red Meat Friday post but I have nothing else to write about today. Anton Zaides has a list of five pieces of received wisdom that we should abandon. We calls them dogmas but I call … Continue reading →

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The New Warp Drive; Same As The Old Warp Drive

Posted on 2025-12-21 by jcs

Today’s subject is a little outside of Irreal’s usual fare but as I said in my first post, Irreal is about, among other things, anything that excites my geek sensibilities. This definitely excites my geek sensibilities. The subject, as you … Continue reading →

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Blogging Without Emacs

Posted on 2025-12-20 by jcs

One of the worst things I can imagine in my blogging workflow would be to be unable to use Emacs for writing my posts. Word Press does have an editor for writing posts, of course, but I have never used … Continue reading →

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Converting Org Mode Text To Markdown In The Clipboard

Posted on 2025-12-19 by jcs

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Charles Choi’s post on converting Markdown in the clipboard to Org mode. Now Choi is back with the inverse operation: converting Org mode text to Markdown in the clipboard. This time the … Continue reading →

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The Annoying Usefulness Of Emacs

Posted on 2025-12-18 by jcs

Tsoding has an interesting—possibly tongue in cheek—video that argues that Emacs is annoyingly useful. He begins by saying that he doesn’t like Emacs because it is “yanky and hacky”. Part of the problem, he says, is that Emacs has been … Continue reading →

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Normalizing C-w Between Terminal And Emacs

Posted on 2025-12-17 by jcs

Another quickie for those of you who prefer using Emacs in the terminal. The default Emacs action for Ctrl+w is to delete the current region. In most shells, Ctrl+w deletes the previous word. Srijan Choudhary found this a little disconcerting … Continue reading →

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Handwritten Notes With Emacs

Posted on 2025-12-16 by jcs

Just a quickie today. This post addresses a niche need that most readers probably aren’t facing. Joar Alexander Pablo von Arndt’s girlfriend recently bought a Framework 12 laptop and stylus and wanted to use it to take handwritten notes that … Continue reading →

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Problematic Key In Terminal Emacs

Posted on 2025-12-15 by jcs

For those of you who like to run Emacs in the terminal, Adithya Kumar has some useful advice. One of the problems with using the terminal is that some key presses are not passed on to Emacs. In graphical mode, … Continue reading →

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