Category Archives: General

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Cloudflare And AWS

Posted on 2025-11-21 by jcs

I’m sure that every Irreal reader is aware of the recent Internet outages caused by problems at AWS and Cloudflare. Most of those readers also know that things happen. Servers fail, cables break, backhoes wreak havoc, software runs up against … Continue reading →

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Destroying Value Wherever They Go

Posted on 2025-11-20 by jcs

As I’ve said many times, management is a necessary part of any successful business, especially any large business. After all, someone has to set the goals, make all the mundane decisions, and do all the politics that would bore an … Continue reading →

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Calc As A Desktop App

Posted on 2025-11-19 by jcs

As I’ve said many times before, I’m a big fan of Emacs Calc. Try as I might, I haven’t been able to master Calc in its entirety. That’s mostly because it has many advanced features that I seldom or never … Continue reading →

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A Reminder About org-clone-subtree-with-time-shift

Posted on 2025-11-18 by jcs

JTR over at The Art Of Not Asking Why has a useful reminder about something that I, at least, always forget about: org-clone-subtree-with-time-shift. The idea is that you have something scheduled on a certain day but want to repeat that … Continue reading →

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Burst-driven Development

Posted on 2025-11-17 by jcs

Most serious Emacs users are familiar with Bozhidar Batsov. He’s a blogger and the developer/maintainer of several OSS and Emacs projects such as RuboCop, CIDER, Projectile, nREPL, and many others. And, of course, he has a full time job. That … Continue reading →

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JTR On Projects In Emacs

Posted on 2025-11-16 by jcs

JTR over at The Art Of Not Asking Why has a post discussing his current scheme for handling projects in Emacs. It’s a post that discusses the problem that many of have with integrating our Org files across all our … Continue reading →

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Snippets With Abbrev Mode

Posted on 2025-11-15 by jcs

I’m a big user of yasnippet. I invoke it several times a day in various contexts. I also use the builtin Emacs abbrev-mode for some simpler text substitutions: “ra” for “→” for instance. Again, I usually use this facility several … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Gategate

Posted on 2025-11-14 by jcs

I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m fed up with the “-gate” meme. Lazy and generally ignorant journalists keep describing every would be scandal—no matter how trivial—as x-gate. The latest example that I’ve seen is the so … Continue reading →

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Short Yes/No Answers

Posted on 2025-11-13 by jcs

Like most longer term Emacs users, one of the first things I did was to get rid of the annoying long-form Yes/No questions that required you to answer “yes” or “no” explicitly. That was easy to do. I simply aliased … Continue reading →

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Finding The File At Point

Posted on 2025-11-12 by jcs

I just discovered a useful trick over at Ruslan’s Tech Blog. It’s about finding the file at point. Ruslan does this a lot. I, on the other hand, hardly every do it but I have gotten used to typing Ctrl+c … Continue reading →

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