Monthly Archives: November 2013

GPG/PGP Best Practices

Posted on 2013-11-20 by jcs

The Privacy and Authenticity Outreach Workgroup of we.riseup.net have published an excellent list of OpenPGP Best Practices. Most Irreal readers, I trust, have already installed and configured GPG/PGP even if most of their usual correspondents haven’t. I’ve written before that … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Iron Law of Data Collection Confirmed

Posted on 2013-11-19 by jcs

Just in case you needed more proof of the iron law of data collection, consider this McClatchyDC story about how almost 5000 people had their personal information swept up and shared with nearly 30 federal agencies because they ordered a … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

What Does It Take?

Posted on 2013-11-18 by jcs

Are you angry yet? How about now?1 Footnotes: 1 To be fair, there’s some controversy associated with this claim and it doesn’t even seem possible—given that Linux is open source—until you remember the greatest hack of all time.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

On Open Space Offices and Idiots

Posted on 2013-11-17 by jcs

A few days ago, Michael Flowersky wrote a blog post that asked the question, What’s the difference between an advocate of open space office and an Idiot? It was an amusing read but I wasn’t going to comment on it … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Delay Update

Posted on 2013-11-16 by jcs

Just a quick note to bring you up to date on my efforts to fix the slow page loading that’s been plaguing Irreal lately. As I mentioned in my last update, the problem appears to be page generation not server … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging | Tagged | 1 Comment

List Character Sets

Posted on 2013-11-15 by jcs

I picked up a useful Emacs command from Xah Lee’s Emacs Blog. It’s from a comment by Stef on Lee’s Emacs & Unicode Tips page. It’s the list-character-sets command. When you call it, you get a list of all the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Cursive Coda

Posted on 2013-11-14 by jcs

I’ve written quite a few posts about the horror that is cursive handwriting. The gist of those posts were that I stopped writing in cursive as soon as I could Cursive handwriting is dying out Those posts stand up pretty … Continue reading →

Posted in General | 2 Comments

Update on Slow Loading of Irreal

Posted on 2013-11-13 by jcs

A quick update on the Irreal loading problems. I ran a tcpdump on a typical page load of Irreal and discovered the following: The initial three-way handshake with the server completes almost immediately. Immediately afterwards the GET from the browser … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging | Tagged | 5 Comments

Ten Steps You Can Take to Protect Yourself from Surveillance

Posted on 2013-11-12 by jcs

The EFF has a list of ten steps you can take to protect yourself from surveillance. There’s nothing there that will come as news to the always informed Irreal reader but it’s a nice summary and worth passing on to … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Gnus Video Part 3

Posted on 2013-11-11 by jcs

Noufal Ibrahim over at EmacsMovies.org has his latest video up. It’s the third on his series about Gnus. In this episode, Ibrahim discusses the scoring and sorting of articles. Like almost everything in Gnus it’s extraordinarily configurable and therefore complex. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment