Category Archives: General

Making It Easy To Unsubscribe

Posted on 2024-10-18 by jcs

One of the really annoying aspects of the digital age is trying to end an online subscription. These subscriptions are always easy to sign up for but very difficult to end. My favorite example is the New York Times. They … Continue reading →

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Apple Was Right

Posted on 2024-10-17 by jcs

Irreal has been preaching for years about the dangers of giving the nannies a backdoor into our private communications. They scream, “Think of the children” at us and insist that they’re the good guys and be trusted to safeguard our … Continue reading →

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Moving Among Emacs Windows

Posted on 2024-10-16 by jcs

Once you discover the utility of having multiple windows in a single Emacs frame, the question of how to switch between those windows arises naturally. Emacs, of course, has you covered. You can use Ctrl+x o to cycle between windows. … Continue reading →

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Organizing A Book In Org Mode

Posted on 2024-10-15 by jcs

Somehow, I missed this great reference to Ron Galloway’s outline for using Org mode to organize a book. Fortunately, Sacha had me covered with her excellent Emacs News. If you haven’t written a book before, it may be surprising how … Continue reading →

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Unique Card Decks Revisited

Posted on 2024-10-14 by jcs

Five years ago, I wrote about an interesting factoid that Paul Graham posted (probably to Twitter) concerning how many unique orderings of a standard 52 playing card deck there are. Almost all Irreal readers will immediately raise their hands shouting, … Continue reading →

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The Downside Of Living A Digital Life

Posted on 2024-10-13 by jcs

Regular readers know that for several years I’ve been endeavoring to live a “digital life”. What that means—more or less—is eschewing pencil and paper, paper bills, checks, dead tree books, physical credit cards, and even things like keys when I … Continue reading →

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Milton After Action Report

Posted on 2024-10-12 by jcs

Here I am. We just got power back today at 15:19. We did have broadband—although the signal was weak—but I didn’t have enough power on my laptop to compose a reasonable post. As you might imagine, everyone we know in … Continue reading →

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Writing With Emacs Redux

Posted on 2024-10-09 by jcs

Four years ago I wrote about James Gill’s list of Emacs resources for writers. It was a curated list of resources that addressed writing prose of various sorts with Emacs. In April, I revisited the list. Judging from what I … Continue reading →

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Milton Outage Alert

Posted on 2024-10-08 by jcs

Sigh. This is yet another warning of an impending Irreal outage due to a hurricane. This time it’s Milton, which intensified very rapidly into a Cat 5 hurricane. There are two very bad pieces of news for the Irreal Bunker. … Continue reading →

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Emacs Configuration Can Be Easy

Posted on 2024-10-07 by jcs

A frequent complaint we hear from n00bs is that Emacs out of the box is unusable, that it’s really hard to configure, and so you need something like Doom to get going. Generations of Emacs users have put the lie … Continue reading →

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