Category Archives: General

Excession and Video Games

Posted on 2015-03-14 by jcs

Over at Tor.com, Peter Tieryas has a very nice post on the connection between Iain M. Banks’ Excession and a video game. Regular readers—or the merely observant—know that I’m a big fan of Banks’ Culture Novels and of Excession in … Continue reading →

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Working with Key Sequences

Posted on 2015-03-13 by jcs

Howard Abrams has a nice post on working with key sequences. He shows how to set up personal key maps with a common prefix. Abrams likes to use 【F9】 as a prefix to several maps. For example, 【F9 m】 is … Continue reading →

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Did You Know

Posted on 2015-03-12 by jcs

There are only 3 animals that don’t reproduce until they die? I didn’t. One of them is humans, of course, but what about the other two? And why are there only three? See the National Geographic article linked above for … Continue reading →

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Sacha on the Power of Plain Text

Posted on 2015-03-12 by jcs

Sacha Chua has a nice post on the power of plain text. There are, she says, three main ways of storing text1: The Heavy Weight Methods This is mainly database systems. Chua says she uses these tools mainly when she’s … Continue reading →

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Link to a Specific Line in a File from Org

Posted on 2015-03-11 by jcs

A nice tip from Robin Green: #Emacs of the day: Want to reference a line from a source file in your docs? Use OrgMode links formatted like file:/path/to/MyFile.cpp::216 — Robin Green (@fatlimey) February 10, 2015

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The Magic Story

Posted on 2015-03-11 by jcs

Years ago, I had a printed copy of The Jargon File and spent many happy hours reading through it. If you haven’t browsed through the file, you should. It’s full of screamingly funny tidbits about our Hacker Culture and Language. … Continue reading →

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Happy Birthday…

Posted on 2015-03-10 by jcs

…Dark Side of the Moon. The iconic Pink Floyd album was released 42 years ago today. One of the most successful albums of all time, it, even today, pops on and off the Billboard 200. Last week (March 7) it … Continue reading →

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Why?

Posted on 2015-03-09 by jcs

Words fail me. Why would anyone do this? WTF is wrong with IBM?! “JSONx is an IBM standard format to represent JSON as XML http://t.co/LLCzz2jTLz” pic.twitter.com/P2xyAo4W2c — Dan Harper (@DanHarper7) September 24, 2014

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Moving The Custom Data Out of init.el

Posted on 2015-03-09 by jcs

I never use the Emacs custom facility. It puts cryptic (alright, not too cryptic) entries into the custom-set-variables and custom-set-faces lists that are far away from all the rest of the customizations for a given package. Even worse, some packages—I’m … Continue reading →

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Where’s Your Emacs Initialization File?

Posted on 2015-03-08 by jcs

TIL: The Emacs variable user-init-file contains the file path of the current initialization file. (via Daniel Ehrman).

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