Monthly Archives: April 2016

How to Keep Emacs Running Across an X Crash

Posted on 2016-04-21 by jcs

If you’re running a Linux system and sometimes experience an X crash, Sacha has some advice on how to keep Emacs running. Emacs is notoriously slow to start, of course, and that alone is reason enough to be annoyed when … Continue reading →

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Which Key

Posted on 2016-04-20 by jcs

Recently, I came across this reddit post on which-key. I think Sacha mentioned it in one of her weekly Emacs News posts too. The post reminded me that Kaushal Modi had recommended that I try it out after I’d mentioned … Continue reading →

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European Quotation Marks

Posted on 2016-04-19 by jcs

I know about the French guillemets but being from North America I had no idea how varied punctuation marks are. Here’s an interesting summary of European quotation marks. Quotation marks in Europe map pic.twitter.com/xLmmajFHql — Andrey Sitnik (@andreysitnik) February 25, … Continue reading →

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A Hyper Key on Any USB Keyboard

Posted on 2016-04-18 by jcs

Grant Rettke over at Wisdom and Wonder has a useful post on how to get a 【Hyper】 key on any USB keyboard. As Rettke says, the 【Hyper】 key is the last modifier that’s available almost exclusively for users. My Emacs … Continue reading →

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The Demise of Midrange Computers

Posted on 2016-04-17 by jcs

Eric Raymond (ESR) has an interesting post on the death of midrange computers. Some time ago he predicted that in the future we would all carry around smartphone-derived computers in our pockets and plug them into stationary keyboard/screen/pointer devices that … Continue reading →

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Fingerprint Sensors Really Do Improve Security

Posted on 2016-04-16 by jcs

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a ProgrammableWeb article positing that biometric sensors decrease security. I made the case that unless you were a criminal with incriminating information on your phone, that was incorrect. I went on to … Continue reading →

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Why You Should Never Listen to the Media About Security

Posted on 2016-04-15 by jcs

Irreal, as you probably know, how a dim view of the effectiveness, among other things, of the media. This is particularly true of the technical press, of course, but also holds for the more main stream traditional press. Case in … Continue reading →

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Some Comment-DWIM Tricks

Posted on 2016-04-14 by jcs

Raimon Grau over at puntoblogspot has a really useful quick tip on a couple of comment-dwim features that I didn’t know about. He shows how to Comment out a blank line. Remove an inline comment. If you use comment-dwim (bound … Continue reading →

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Debugging

Posted on 2016-04-13 by jcs

Via Jean-Philippe Paradis. So true. I remember debugging a problem that disappeared as soon as I put a printf in the code to see what was happening. Typical code debugging. pic.twitter.com/z764dhyJ5Z — Ryan Houdek (@sonicadvance1) March 5, 2016

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An Example of Why Reproducible Research Matters

Posted on 2016-04-12 by jcs

Dennis Ogbe, whom I’ve written about before, has a nice example of why reproducible research matters. If you’ve read those previous posts you know that Ogbe is a PhD student in Electrical Engineering at Purdue. As such he reads papers … Continue reading →

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