Category Archives: General

What Not Using M-dashes Really Means

Posted on 2026-04-20 by jcs

A year ago, I learned from my friend Watts Martin that according to LinkedIn know nothings influencers, the use of em-dashes is a sure sign of AI generated text. Real people, they said, use hyphens so whenever you see an … Continue reading →

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Artemis II’s Fault Tolerant Computer

Posted on 2026-04-19 by jcs

The other day, I wrote about the amazing engineering behind Voyager 1. Space is a harsh environment and equipment that would be perfectly fine here on Earth would not survive in space. Artemis II, which carried the crew farther away … Continue reading →

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A Short Report On Help Focus

Posted on 2026-04-18 by jcs

Earlier this week I wrote about Bozhidar Batsov’s post on short Emacs configuration hacks. As I mentioned then, my favorite was a simple configuration variable that causes the Help buffer to get focus when you open it. It’s easy to … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Writing Telephone Numbers

Posted on 2026-04-17 by jcs

I don’t know why this is a Red Meat Friday item but, apparently, it is. Back in 2024, the AP Stylebook changed its specification for the formatting of telephone numbers. From now on the telephone number that used to be … Continue reading →

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LaTeX Preview In Emacs

Posted on 2026-04-16 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, _DonK4rma shows an example of his mathematical note taking in Emacs. It’s a nice example of how flexible Org mode is even for writing text with heavy mathematical content but probably not too interesting to … Continue reading →

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Switching Between Dired Windows With TAB

Posted on 2026-04-15 by jcs

Just a quickie today. Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a very nice little post on using Tab with Dired. By default, Tab isn’t defined in Dired but mbork suggests an excellent use for it and provides the code to implement his … Continue reading →

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Alfred Snippets

Posted on 2026-04-14 by jcs

Today while I was going through my feed, I saw this this post from macosxguru over at Bicycle For Your Mind. It’s about his system for using snippets on his system. The TL;DR is that he has settled on Typinator … Continue reading →

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Some Config Hacks

Posted on 2026-04-13 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov has an excellent post that collects several configuration hacks from a variety of people and distributions. It’s a long list and rather than list them all, I’m going to mention just a few that appeal to me. Some … Continue reading →

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Days Until

Posted on 2026-04-12 by jcs

Charles Choi recently saw a Mastodon post showing the days until the next election and started wondering how one would compute that with Emacs. He looked into it and, of course, the answer turned out to be simple. Org mode … Continue reading →

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Magit Support

Posted on 2026-04-11 by jcs

Just about everyone agrees that the two Emacs packages considered “killer apps” by those considering adopting the editor are Org mode and Magit. I’ve seen several people say they use Emacs mainly for one or the other. Their development models … Continue reading →

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