Category Archives: General

Why You Still Don’t Mess Around With Jim

Posted on 2024-10-06 by jcs

I’ve written before about the dangers of messing around with Jim [1, 2]. The reference is to a wonderful Jim Croce song explaining the dangers of messing around with a bad man by the name of Big Jim Walker. The … Continue reading →

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Commercial Surveillance: Out Of Control

Posted on 2024-10-05 by jcs

It’s been a while since the minions and I indulged ourselves in a good privacy rant. You can consider that remedied with this post. The EFF is reporting the results of an FTC report on how companies abuse their users’ … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Is Lisp Syntax Boring

Posted on 2024-10-04 by jcs

Wait. What? Is Lisp syntax boring? My immediate response is, “Of course it is.” That’s its strength. Lisp doesn’t have much syntax so unlike other languages you can immediately start using the language without having to worry about learning a … Continue reading →

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The Atkinson Hyperlegible Font

Posted on 2024-10-03 by jcs

As those of you who have been around for awhile know, Irreal has a fascination with fonts for Emacs. I most recently wrote about them here. But, all those posts have been about coding fonts. Today, I want to talk … Continue reading →

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Should You Do What You Love

Posted on 2024-10-02 by jcs

Paul Graham has another great post up. This time it’s about whether you should chose to work on what interests you. To a first approximation, it seems like a no-brainer: of course you should. But what if you want, or … Continue reading →

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File And Directory Creation In Dired

Posted on 2024-10-01 by jcs

One of the activities that Irreal encourages is the sanding down of friction points. Despite that, I’m almost always surprised when I do automate some routine task and wonder why I waited so long to do it. If you’ve been … Continue reading →

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Emacs Has No Learning Curve

Posted on 2024-09-30 by jcs

Paul E. Johnson is a member of the Political Science Department at the University of Kansas. As such, he’s not a canonical Emacs user but he has a provacative set of slides that suggests that, in fact, Emacs doesn’t have … Continue reading →

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Emacs Popups In macOS

Posted on 2024-09-29 by jcs

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Protesilaos Stavrou’s excellent post on triggering an Emacs popup from anywhere in your system. It’s perfect for Org capture and other things you might want to do when you’re in some other … Continue reading →

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Why Emacs: The View From Vim

Posted on 2024-09-28 by jcs

As every Irreal surely knows, I’m a die hard Emacs user but I was, for a long time, a Vim user and still consider it one of the two best editors. It’s long been my view that Emacs and Vim … Continue reading →

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After Action Report: Helene

Posted on 2024-09-27 by jcs

Just a quick note to let you know what’s happening at the Irreal bunker. We got through the passage of Helene without mishap but just as the storm had moved to the North of us and we were out of … Continue reading →

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