Category Archives: General

A Handy Calc Tip

Posted on 2018-01-06 by jcs

As I wrote three weeks ago in these two posts, I’ve renewed my efforts to become semi-proficient with Calc. On the one hand, it’s not that hard. By default, it’s simply a stack based RPN calculator of the sort that … Continue reading →

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Frame Peek

Posted on 2018-01-05 by jcs

As part of his Emacs mini manual series, tuhdo introduces an interesting idea for quickly looking at, say, a function definition. There are lots of ways of doing that, of course, and tuhdo isn’t advocating any particular one or eve … Continue reading →

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Imenu

Posted on 2018-01-04 by jcs

Here’s a useful reminder from Wilfred Hughes: M-x imenu: lists all the functions, classes and top-level variables in a file. Great for getting an overview, or for jumping around. Works in pretty much every language too! pic.twitter.com/kibmFD2y8N — Ⓔ Command … Continue reading →

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Lava Lamps

Posted on 2018-01-03 by jcs

If you’re a geek with an interest in cryptography, you know that one of the hardest problems in practical cryptography is random number generation. A weak PRG (pseudorandom number generator) is one of the surest ways to get a cryptographic … Continue reading →

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Typesetting the TeX and LaTeX Symbols with Org Mode

Posted on 2018-01-02 by jcs

After writing yesterday’s post, I poked around a bit on Higham’s site looking at some of his recent posts. I’m glad I did because I discovered that something I’ve wanted to do is possible. Occasionally I want to typeset the … Continue reading →

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Tweets on Emacs and Org Mode

Posted on 2018-01-01 by jcs

Nick Higham, whom I’ve mentioned before (1, 2), is a Mathematician and Emacs user. He also, apparently, is like me in that he likes collecting odd bits of information and data. One bit of data that he likes to collect … Continue reading →

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König 36: A Third Way of Setting and Tracking Goals

Posted on 2017-12-31 by jcs

Rainer König is back with a followup to his previous video on setting and tracking goals that I wrote about a week ago. This time he approaches the task using hierarchial tags. With hierarchial tags, you give a set of … Continue reading →

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The Longevity of CDs

Posted on 2017-12-30 by jcs

Just a few years ago, CDs were still ubiquitous and one of the things the Geekier elements worried about was that they would become unreadable over time. That was probably a reasonable concern, especially for CDs that the user burned … Continue reading →

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Remember This?

Posted on 2017-12-29 by jcs

Unless you are really young, you probably remember a spate of capacitor failures in electronic devices of all sorts including computer motherboards. This was around the turn of the century. One of my family members practically had a production line … Continue reading →

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You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Posted on 2017-12-28 by jcs

I can’t decide if this is a joke or if someone is actually that clueless. It’s not April 1st so I’m reluctantly concluding that it’s for real1. I’m sure Miessler was surprised to learn that he’s maintaining the master password … Continue reading →

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