Monthly Archives: April 2015

Memacs Paper

Posted on 2015-04-30 by jcs

I’ve mentioned Karl Voit’s Memacs project before. I’m really interested in its ideas and have been implementing various manual procedures to capture some of the same data. My end goal is to implement Memacs on my own machines but it … Continue reading →

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A Nice Set of Emacs Tips

Posted on 2015-04-29 by jcs

Via Artur Malabarba we have a link to an excellent set of Emacs tips from Ben Maughan. Maughan has a local mailing list to which he posts an Emacs tip every week. Happily, for the rest of us, the list … Continue reading →

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Grep in Emacs

Posted on 2015-04-28 by jcs

Xah Lee has a useful tutorial page on grep and grep-like searches from Emacs. The page is an old one but is worth bookmarking if, like me, you keep a list of valuable Emacs reference material. For some reason, I … Continue reading →

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Some Dired Tips

Posted on 2015-04-27 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a nice post on Emacs dired tips. Dired is amazingly powerful but most of us don’t begin to take advantage of its capabilities. Mbork looks at a few things you can do to enhance your workflow … Continue reading →

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The 500 Mile Email Limit

Posted on 2015-04-26 by jcs

If you’re in our business for any length of time, you accumulate a number of amusing stories. Most of them are in-jokes that outsiders wouldn’t get or find funny. One of my favorite such stories concerns a problem with email … Continue reading →

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Diceware as a Pipeline

Posted on 2015-04-25 by jcs

If you’re interested in picking a passphrase using the Diceware method but don’t want to bother with compiling a program for what is most likely a one-off use, you’re in luck. Dr. Drang over at And now it’s all this … Continue reading →

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Working with Customers

Posted on 2015-04-24 by jcs

We’ve all been there: True. "@amyengineer: Also found this gem on software development – it *is* a winner. pic.twitter.com/r1qkTF2bzq" — Anna Nachesa (@ashalynd) April 14, 2015

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Calc Update

Posted on 2015-04-24 by jcs

I’ve written before that I’ve started learning Calc. That last post was after I’d worked through the introductory material (which is, itself, quite dense). I’ve now completed the first three sections of the tutorial covering Basic Tutorial (RPN, stack, algebraic … Continue reading →

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Text in Academic Writing

Posted on 2015-04-23 by jcs

If you’re an academic in the sciences, you have an advantage over your colleagues in the liberal arts: you can write in LaTeX using any editor you choose1. Your document is in plain text and can be operated on by … Continue reading →

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Two From Xah

Posted on 2015-04-22 by jcs

Xah Lee has a couple of useful tutorials on the finer points of ibuffer and the isearch family. Every Emacs user is familiar with forward and backward incremental search, 【Ctrl+s】and 【Ctrl+r】, but there are some more specialized commands as well. … Continue reading →

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