Category Archives: General

Loading Emacs Faster

Posted on 2015-12-09 by jcs

Eric Cole has an interesting post on decreasing the Emacs load time. This is not something I’ve ever worried about because I tend to load it once when the machine boots and just keep it running. It makes no difference … Continue reading →

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Dired Hacks

Posted on 2015-12-08 by jcs

Fuco, the author of the excellent smartparens package, has a collection of useful additions to dired. Rather than define a comprehensive package, he broken the functionality out into separate packages so that you can install just what you need. He … Continue reading →

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Management Learns an Expensive Lesson

Posted on 2015-12-07 by jcs

Many, or perhaps most, of us have suffered through a round of layoffs and have found ourselves suddenly unemployed. Often these layoffs are handled in a clumsy and uncaring way. One common tactic is to call the victim into the … Continue reading →

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Tools to Protect You from Surveillance

Posted on 2015-12-06 by jcs

Jordan Fried sent me a link to his excellent article on 150 Tools to Protect Your from Global Surveillance. The article covers Encryption Cryptocurrency Using the Internet anonymously Securing email Securing your browser Secure communication The Cloud Guide to antivirus, … Continue reading →

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DWIM Narrowing Improvement

Posted on 2015-12-05 by jcs

A year ago I wrote about Artur Malabarba’s excellent narrow-or-widen-dwim function. Ever since I installed it, I don’t think I’ve once called one of the narrowing functions directly. Since then, Malabarba has posted some updates to his original post making … Continue reading →

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The Real Problem in the Encryption Wars

Posted on 2015-12-04 by jcs

The Washington Post has an interesting take on the on-going encryption wars. Daniel Weitzner, a former White House deputy chief technology officer for Internet policy, has an op-ed in which he lays out the usual arguments against backdoors in encryption … Continue reading →

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The TOR Attack

Posted on 2015-12-03 by jcs

Fusion has a lengthy and informative report on the recent TOR attack. To some extent, the TOR project dropped the ball and failed to understand the seriousness of what they were seeing. The real villains, though, appear to be two … Continue reading →

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How to Fix a Stuck Emacs

Posted on 2015-12-02 by jcs

A very handy tip from Wilfred Hughes: Emacs tip: If your instance hangs and won't respond to C-g, you can use `pkill -SIGUSR2 emacs` to force emacs to stop whatever it's doing. — Wilfred Hughes (@_wilfredh) October 28, 2015 Emacs … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.3.1 Released

Posted on 2015-12-01 by jcs

The latest release of Steel Bank Common Lisp, version 1.3.1, was released on November 27. This month’s release contains 7 enhancements, including SB_THREAD for ARM64, and a bunch of bug fixes. See the NEWS page for details. As usual, I … Continue reading →

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The First Rule for Using Org

Posted on 2015-11-30 by jcs

I’ve seen lots of pointers lately to this message from Carsten Dominik on the use of Org mode and managing its perceived complexity. At the end of the message he says What people miss when they are new to Org-mode … Continue reading →

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