Monthly Archives: November 2019

PSA: How To Hotkey Into Messages in MacOS Catalina

Posted on 2019-11-30 by jcs

This post will interest only Mac users so those of you who worship in another church will probably want to skip it. I spend almost all of my tube time in either Emacs or Safari but I usually have three … Continue reading →

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Claim: 95% of Users Prefer Dark Mode

Posted on 2019-11-29 by jcs

Over at Polar, they’re getting a lot of requests to implement Dark Mode for their application. They claim that 95% of users prefer dark over light mode. Actually, they’re a little more nuanced than that so you should follow the … Continue reading →

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Any Well Shuffled Card Deck Is Almost Certainly Unique

Posted on 2019-11-28 by jcs

From Paul Graham we have this interesting fact: Any time you pick up a well shuffled deck, you are almost certainly holding an arrangement of cards that has never before existed and will likely never exist again. – Yannay Khaikin … Continue reading →

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HTML Email

Posted on 2019-11-27 by jcs

If you’ve watched Perry Metzger’s Emacs Conference 2019 talk, as I hope you have, you’ll know that Metzger believes that modern Email should be carried as HTML. He wants—needs, he says—to see his colleagues emails exactly as they were written … Continue reading →

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Perry Metzger: The Editor for the Next 40 Years

Posted on 2019-11-26 by jcs

The videos from the Emacs Conference 2019 are up at YouTube. As many of you know I’m a big fan of Perry Metzger’s 2014 talk on 31 years as an Emacs user so the first video I watched was what … Continue reading →

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Scimax and Reproducibility

Posted on 2019-11-25 by jcs

The College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon has an interesting article on their Web site about John Kitchin and his work on Scimax. I’ve written about Scimax several times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) so longtime Irreal readers … Continue reading →

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Emacs 27.1 Coming

Posted on 2019-11-24 by jcs

Eli Zaretskii has issued what amounts to a last call for new features to appear in Emacs 27.1. He’s planning to create an Emacs-27 release branch in about a week. After that, only bug fixes for the release will be … Continue reading →

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The Pros and Cons of a Cashless Society

Posted on 2019-11-23 by jcs

Over the last month or two, I’ve written a bit about the idea of eliminating cash and moving to a digital payment system. There are some problems with eliminating all cash so my preferred outcome is merely that it be … Continue reading →

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Chris Wellons on PRNGs

Posted on 2019-11-22 by jcs

I’ve long been an admirer of Chris Wellons’ work and have written about him many times. I almost always learn something new and useful from his blog posts so of course I take notice when he publishes something new. His … Continue reading →

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What Did They Think Was Going To Happen?

Posted on 2019-11-21 by jcs

I can’t stop laughing: Microsoft Office 365 down worldwide https://t.co/1uUw6fNN2B pic.twitter.com/Hi96L3JFnW — Newshub (@NewshubNZ) November 20, 2019 I’m evil, I know, but the schadenfreude is killing me. I don’t feel even a little sorry for these people. They’ve been warned … Continue reading →

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