Category Archives: General

Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You

Posted on 2017-08-06 by jcs

As yet another example of why we should always look askance at the government collecting data, I offer the recently revealed debacle of the Swedish government’s loss of control of government and police databases. The databases contain information on almost … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Claude Shannon Redux

Posted on 2017-08-05 by jcs

Recently, I wrote about the IEEE Spectrum’s article on Claude Shannon by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. If you haven’t already read their article, I urge you to do so. Shannon was a fascinating man and a genius virtually unknown … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

The Pass Password Manager

Posted on 2017-08-04 by jcs

A recurrent theme here at Irreal is that you really need to be using a password manager. Let it generate a long, unique, random key for each site and protect those keys with a secure master password (generated by, say, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Tuning Your Emacs Configuration for a Fast Load

Posted on 2017-08-03 by jcs

Gergely Risko has an interesting GitHub repository that explores ways of making your Emacs load time as small as possible. Unless I’m hacking on my configuration, I rarely start Emacs except at boot time so the two or three seconds … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 6 Comments

Configuring Notmuch and Offlineimap for Emacs

Posted on 2017-08-02 by jcs

As most of you are doubtless sick of hearing by now, I’ve settled very happily on mu/mu4e to handle my email from within Emacs. It’s not the only possibility, of course, and many other Emacers prefer using notmuch, which is … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

An Application of let-alist

Posted on 2017-08-01 by jcs

Since Emacs 25.1, Artur Malabarba’s excellent let-alist macro has been a built-in feature of Emacs. As the name suggests, it’s a way of dealing with alists. The idea is that instead of writing a series of assq and cdr statements, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

Zamansky 36: Swapping Buffers and Some Elisp

Posted on 2017-07-31 by jcs

Mike Zamansky has another video up. This time, it’s about swapping buffers but keeping focus in the original window. The video is interesting because it shows the process Zamansky went through to solve a problem he was having. The problem … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Creating a Branch from the Current Git State

Posted on 2017-07-30 by jcs

Kris Jenkins, whose wonderful video I’ve written about before, has posted a very handy Magit tip. What do you do if you want to add a feature branch but start working on it before creating the branch? What you’d like … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | 3 Comments

The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written

Posted on 2017-07-29 by jcs

If you’re a lisper and enjoy Scheme, you may like William Byrd’s video on The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written. Unless you’ve been immersed in the Lisp culture, it’s probably not what you think. According to Byrd, the most beautiful … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Hosting Your Own Contacts and Calendar

Posted on 2017-07-28 by jcs

Those of you who have been around for a while, know that I live in the Apple ecosystem. I like having all my devices synced up automatically and Apple does that pretty seamlessly and, I believe, reasonably securely. Still, I … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment