Category Archives: General

The World’s Most Recognized English Word

Posted on 2026-06-15 by jcs

A short test of your intuition: what’s the most recognized English word in the world? There are, of course, a bunch of words that everybody know in every language: please, thank you, bathroom… but this is an English word that … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Dired Flat File Listings

Posted on 2026-06-14 by jcs

It turns out that if you call Dired from Elisp, you can pass it a list of files to display. Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) leveraged that fact to write a bit of Elisp that provides him with a flat list of … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Your Digital Inheritance

Posted on 2026-06-13 by jcs

As you most of you know, I live a digital life. That doesn’t mean I have no existence outside the Internet or that I don’t have real life friends and loved ones. It simply means that almost all my transactions … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

AsciiDoc In Emacs

Posted on 2026-06-12 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov has a post announcing a couple of new Emacs modes for AsciiDoc. In the usual Batsov way, he’s significantly improved the support for AsciiDoc in Emacs. He loves AsciiDoc but found it hard to use in Emacs because … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

An Emacs Based Writerdeck

Posted on 2026-06-11 by jcs

If you follow writers at all, you’ll have noticed that many prefer to write their prose in long hand even if they began their writing career with a computer. Tess Gerretsen and Neal Stephenson are two examples that come to … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Emacs In Pop Culture

Posted on 2026-06-10 by jcs

Ian Pan has curated a nice collection of Emacs caught in the wild. By “in the wild” I mean “in popular culture”: things like movies and comics. Most of us have seen the familiar scene from Tron but Pan has … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The First Wireless Telephone

Posted on 2026-06-09 by jcs

A short quiz in two parts for you: When was the first wireless telephone invented? Who invented it? The answers are surprising and not at all what you might have expected. If you’re like me, something involving radio is probably … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Elfeed 4.0.0

Posted on 2026-06-08 by jcs

Daniel Mendler, who took over as maintainer of the world’s best RSS reader, Elfeed, has announced the release of Elfeed 4.0.0. You can read the Change File to see what’s new but the most important point for me is that … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Correcting The Orientation of macOS Photos on Linux

Posted on 2026-06-07 by jcs

JTR over at The Art Of Not Asking Why describes a problem—and its resolution—that I didn’t know existed. The TL;DR is that photographs taken with an iPhone are always captured in landscape mode but Apple’s software detects portrait photos and … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Emacs 31.0.90 Pretest

Posted on 2026-06-06 by jcs

Sean Whitton writes to tell us that the first Emacs 31 pretest, emacs.31.0.90, is available for download. It’s been almost two years since the first Emacs 30 pretest came out so we’re pretty much on schedule for our yearly major … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment