Monthly Archives: October 2019

Asynchronous Communication

Posted on 2019-10-21 by jcs

Amir Salihefendic of Doist notes that study after study have shown that remote workers are more productive and asks why that is. One thing that everyone cites is the time saved on commuting and to a lessor extent the lack … Continue reading →

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Navigating With Spacemacs

Posted on 2019-10-20 by jcs

Over at the GDQuest YouTube Channel, Nathan Lovato has a very nice video on navigating with Spacemacs. Most of the video discusses the Spacemacs interface to the Avy package for jumping around in your code. I’m not a Spacemacs user … Continue reading →

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Zamansky 59: Markdown

Posted on 2019-10-19 by jcs

Most people recognize that Emacs Org mode is superior to Markdown as a markup language. (Sorry Markdown partisans but it is1.) The problem with Org mode is that as a practical matter it’s restricted to Emacs users. Mostly that doesn’t … Continue reading →

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A Talk With Brian Kernighan

Posted on 2019-10-18 by jcs

Back in March, John Mashey interviewed Brian Kernighan at Princeton about his career and technical work. It’s a wonderful video that covers his career from his undergraduage years to his current position as a professor at Princeton. We’ve heard some … Continue reading →

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Emacs and MacOS Catalina

Posted on 2019-10-17 by jcs

Last night I upgraded my MacBook Pro to macOS Catalina (macOS 10.15). I’d been holding off to see if there were reports of problems with Emacs on the new OS. That happened last time with the upgrade to Mojave because … Continue reading →

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The Many Functions of a Smartphone

Posted on 2019-10-16 by jcs

Remember back in the original Star Trek series how Spock carried around a tricorder? I always wanted one of those. Now, of course, I have something even better: my iPhone. Smartphones are general purpose devices that perform many functions, certainly … Continue reading →

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More on Cashless

Posted on 2019-10-15 by jcs

Surprisingly, to me, my post on the trend to becoming a virtually cashless society generated a lot of interest and comments. Given my nearly unblemished record on being unable to predict how popular a given Irreal post will be, I … Continue reading →

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Generating Slides and a PDF From the Same Org File

Posted on 2019-10-14 by jcs

Karl Voit has a revealing post in his UOMF series that explains how to generate a slide deck and supporting PDF from the same Org file. That has some obvious benefits, not least that it provides a single source of … Continue reading →

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Just A Reminder…

Posted on 2019-10-13 by jcs

…of why I call Steve Purcell an Open Source hero: Incredible! MELPA has passed 100 million package downloads. Thanks, everyone, for your support since 2012. 😍 pic.twitter.com/GRRtWS6btQ — Steve Purcell 🇪🇺 (@sanityinc) October 9, 2019 As I’ve said before, Purcell … Continue reading →

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Toasters, New and Old

Posted on 2019-10-12 by jcs

About a year ago, ESR wrote a post on consumer grade toasters and how, regardless of price, they are all essentially the same, suffer from identical problems, and are basically junk. It’s hard not to sympathize. Here at Irreal headquarters … Continue reading →

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