Monthly Archives: April 2016

What to do When Emacs Hangs or Crashes

Posted on 2016-04-30 by jcs

Jisang Yoo has a very nice post on recovering from Emacs hangs or crashes. He considers three topics What do do when Emacs hangs How to enable debugging What to do when Emacs crashes His advice on Emacs hanging seems … Continue reading →

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Tips on Writing a Major Mode

Posted on 2016-04-29 by jcs

Wilfred Hughes wrote an Emacs major mode for Cask. Afterwards, he distilled what he learned into a post on writing major modes. The post is not a tutorial on how to write major modes; it’s a few tips that will … Continue reading →

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Aphantasia

Posted on 2016-04-28 by jcs

Blake Ross and I have something in common. We’ve both learned a fact that blew our minds. The thing is, it blew our respective minds for opposite reasons. Ross suffers from a condition called aphantasia: the inability to form mental … Continue reading →

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Still No Justice

Posted on 2016-04-27 by jcs

Yesterday, I saw James Clapper on TV. That reminded me of this. It’s been over 3 years and Clapper still hasn’t been charged or even fired. If you’re an American, ask yourself what would happen to you if you lied … Continue reading →

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Happy Birthday Irreal

Posted on 2016-04-26 by jcs

Today is the 5th birthday of Irreal.org. The blog, in its Blogger incarnation, is a couple of years older but 5 years ago today Irreal opened for business at http://irreal.org/blog as a WordPress blog. Things haven’t worked out quite as … Continue reading →

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Blogging with Org Mode

Posted on 2016-04-26 by jcs

John Louis Del Rosario offers another nice example of blogging with Org Mode. What makes Rosario’s solution unique is that he doesn’t use Jekyll, Nikola, or any other blogging engine. Rather, he serves static pages to his hosting provider via … Continue reading →

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Elisp Summary

Posted on 2016-04-25 by jcs

Mitch Fincher has posted an excellent summary of Emacs lisp. If you’re vaguely familiar with Lisp-like languages but don’t know the particulars of Elisp this page will help you get up to speed. If you’re already familiar with Elisp, you … Continue reading →

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Emacs for Prose

Posted on 2016-04-24 by jcs

I just came across a tweet pointing to an old post by Urpo Lankinen about using Emacs for writing prose. I’m always interested in that topic so I followed the link and read the post. It seemed vaguely familiar—especially with … Continue reading →

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FISA Abandons the Fourth Amendment (Again)

Posted on 2016-04-23 by jcs

Remember how I told you and told you and told you and told you and told you about the Iron Law of Data Collection? That no matter what the government says or promises, data, once collected, will find other uses … Continue reading →

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Blogging with Org Mode and Nikola

Posted on 2016-04-22 by jcs

I’ve written before about using Jekyll as a blogging engine (1, 2). It’s a nice solution but it’s not the only one. Mike Zamansky was using Jekyll but didn’t like that he had to maintain a Ruby development environment on … Continue reading →

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