Monthly Archives: May 2019

Hidden Gems #4: TODOs

Posted on 2019-05-31 by jcs

Cheong Yiufung has another great post up in his Org-mode Hidden Gems series. The latest post takes a look at Org-mode TODO functionality. As usual, I learned some new things proving again that the “hidden gems” tag is appropriate, at … Continue reading →

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The Story of VisiCalc

Posted on 2019-05-30 by jcs

Via Karl Voit I found this video of Dan Bricklin telling the story of how VisiCalc came to be. Many younger Irreal readers probably don’t remember Lotus 1-2-3 let alone VisiCalc so it’s worth mentioning that VisiCalc was the first … Continue reading →

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A Year of Emacs

Posted on 2019-05-29 by jcs

Jonathan Bennett has an interesting project underway. He’s a longtime Vim user whose evolving needs led him to Emacs. At first, he used Spacemacs but he had problems with its speed and had difficulties configuring it. So he moved on … Continue reading →

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Taking It Very Seriously

Posted on 2019-05-28 by jcs

The other day I wrote about the costs Equifax is finally having to bear for its 2017 breach of 150 million consumer records. Apparently, First American Financial Corporation upon learning of the Equifax breach said, “Hold my beer.” Over the … Continue reading →

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More on Multics Emacs

Posted on 2019-05-27 by jcs

Back in January, I wrote about Bernard Greenberg’s history of Emacs on the Multics system. I just found a set of contemporaneous notes on the first 110 days of Multics Emacs’ development. What’s amazing is how quickly they were able … Continue reading →

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The Past Comes Due for Equifax

Posted on 2019-05-26 by jcs

For those who have forgotten, 2 years ago Equifax—one of the top three credit reporting services in the world—suffered a catastrophic breach that resulted in the loss of data on 150 million people. The details are drearily familiar: Equifax had … Continue reading →

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Toggling iTerm2 Full Screen Mode

Posted on 2019-05-25 by jcs

This post is Apple Mac specific so Linux and Windows users can have the day off. I came across this tweet that has a very useful piece of parenthetical information: TIL about `winner-mode` for #emacs. Excellent tool (especially after having … Continue reading →

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Implementing the Eisenhower Matrix in Org-mode

Posted on 2019-05-24 by jcs

The Eisenhower Matrix—so named because it was used by Dwight Eisenhower—is a technique of visualizing and prioritizing decisions by marking them urgent/non-urgent and important/non-important. If you mark each task with the two attributes, it will fall into one of four … Continue reading →

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A Long Form Writing Environment

Posted on 2019-05-23 by jcs

Ryan Rix, who has the most well thought out and complete Emacs environment that I’ve seen has a post on the setup he uses for long form writing. By “long form” he means more than a paragraph or two on … Continue reading →

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Working Remotely

Posted on 2019-05-22 by jcs

I’ve long been enamored of the idea of working from anywhere. These days, that seems boringly quotidian but just a few years ago it was a radical idea fiercely resisted by the type of manager who believed that unless you … Continue reading →

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