Monthly Archives: January 2020

Spacemacs for Writers

Posted on 2020-01-31 by jcs

Frank Jonen has an interesting GitHub repository to help non-technical people use Spacemacs for writing. Jonen says that his interest in using Emacs for writing and the resulting repository were inspired by Jax Dixit’s talk for the New York Emacs … Continue reading →

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A Test for the Iron Law

Posted on 2020-01-30 by jcs

If you’ve been around Irreal for a while, you know about the Iron Law of Data Collection. Briefly, the law says that anytime data is collected No matter the rationale and promises about the data collection and the purposes to … Continue reading →

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Finding The Intersection of Two Lists

Posted on 2020-01-29 by jcs

I recently saw an Emacs Stack Exchange Question on how to find the intersection of two lists. The questioner asked if there was a better way than the obvious solution of looping over both lists looking for matches, a \(O(mn)\) … Continue reading →

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Org Mode 9.3.2

Posted on 2020-01-28 by jcs

Bastien writes that Org Mode 9.3.2 has been released. It’s a bug release so no new features but if you are experiencing problems with Org, you should consider upgrading. Even if you aren’t seeing problems, it’s probably a good idea … Continue reading →

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Another Great Example of Recursion

Posted on 2020-01-27 by jcs

Remember how I told you that Joe Marshall was really good at coming up with elegant examples of recursion? He’s back with another. This time it’s not one he thought up but it’s too good not to share. Here’s the … Continue reading →

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Undo Region

Posted on 2020-01-26 by jcs

Here’s an Emacs feature that I—and, apparently, many others—didn’t know about: Uh this emacs region undo thing is kinda blowing my mind. I had no idea! pic.twitter.com/WWYbZtNIM4 — John Wiseman (@lemonodor) January 24, 2020 That’s a fantastic time and effort … Continue reading →

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Surprise! Online Advertisers Are Breaking The Law

Posted on 2020-01-25 by jcs

According to a report by Forbrukerradet—which I think is the Norwegian Consumer Council—online advertisers are ignoring the GDPR and continuing to track consumers and build profiles of them. The report, linked above, and the technical addendum are both quite long … Continue reading →

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Makefiles for Elisp

Posted on 2020-01-24 by jcs

Chris Wellons has another great post over at Null Program. This post discusses how he uses makefiles to build his Emacs packages. If you’re like most Elisp programmers, you probably write only small bits of Elisp to add to your … Continue reading →

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Another Victory in the Walletless Crusade

Posted on 2020-01-23 by jcs

As you regular readers know, I’m always in search of ways to minimize the things I have to carry around and, in particular, to avoid carrying a wallet with the cash and credit cards that goes with it. My main … Continue reading →

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Karl Voit on Starting to Use Org-mode

Posted on 2020-01-22 by jcs

Karl Voit has a nice post in his Using Org Mode Features series. It’s advice on how to start using Org-mode. Org-mode is large and complicated and can seem intimidating. That leads many people to start with someone else’s configuration. … Continue reading →

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