Monthly Archives: January 2018

Experiencing the Old Days

Posted on 2018-01-11 by jcs

Many of you know I like reading about early Unix history and how the original developers worked to implement the utilities that we take for granted today. A nice resource for this is The Unix Heritage Society and their mailing … Continue reading →

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Apple and Targeted Ad Revenue

Posted on 2018-01-10 by jcs

Here’s some good new (via John Gruber) from the fight against ad-tech and the industry’s efforts to track our every move on the Internet. The Guardian is reporting that companies perpetrating these outrages are losing hundreds of millions of dollars … Continue reading →

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An Oldie but Goodie

Posted on 2018-01-09 by jcs

I was looking at some old Irreal posts and stumbled across this post. It’s something that I’d completely forgotten about so I thought it would be worthwhile pointing to it again. The TL;DR is that when using Magnar Sveen’s excellent … Continue reading →

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Linux Journal on Scimax

Posted on 2018-01-08 by jcs

Over at the Linux Journal, Joey Bernard has a nice article on John Kitchin’s scimax. I’ve written about scimax before but for those who came in late, it’s a collection of Emacs and Org mode tools to make using reproducible … Continue reading →

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The Em-Dash

Posted on 2018-01-07 by jcs

Those of you who have been around for a while and who pay attention to such things have probably noticed that I’m partial to—probably overly partial to1—the use of em-dashes. I no longer remember for sure how it started but … Continue reading →

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A Handy Calc Tip

Posted on 2018-01-06 by jcs

As I wrote three weeks ago in these two posts, I’ve renewed my efforts to become semi-proficient with Calc. On the one hand, it’s not that hard. By default, it’s simply a stack based RPN calculator of the sort that … Continue reading →

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Frame Peek

Posted on 2018-01-05 by jcs

As part of his Emacs mini manual series, tuhdo introduces an interesting idea for quickly looking at, say, a function definition. There are lots of ways of doing that, of course, and tuhdo isn’t advocating any particular one or eve … Continue reading →

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Imenu

Posted on 2018-01-04 by jcs

Here’s a useful reminder from Wilfred Hughes: M-x imenu: lists all the functions, classes and top-level variables in a file. Great for getting an overview, or for jumping around. Works in pretty much every language too! pic.twitter.com/kibmFD2y8N — Ⓔ Command … Continue reading →

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Lava Lamps

Posted on 2018-01-03 by jcs

If you’re a geek with an interest in cryptography, you know that one of the hardest problems in practical cryptography is random number generation. A weak PRG (pseudorandom number generator) is one of the surest ways to get a cryptographic … Continue reading →

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Typesetting the TeX and LaTeX Symbols with Org Mode

Posted on 2018-01-02 by jcs

After writing yesterday’s post, I poked around a bit on Higham’s site looking at some of his recent posts. I’m glad I did because I discovered that something I’ve wanted to do is possible. Occasionally I want to typeset the … Continue reading →

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