Monthly Archives: January 2020

Digital Inheritance

Posted on 2020-01-21 by jcs

I know all you readers think you’re going to live forever—and if you’re young enough that might even be (approximately) true—or you at least think it’s way too early to be thinking about wills and other such unpleasant matters. Nonetheless, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Ebola Vaccine That Almost Didn’t Happen

Posted on 2020-01-20 by jcs

Unless you follow these things, you might not know that a vaccine for the deadly Ebola virus has been licensed in both Europe and the U.S. The vaccine appears to be highly effective and is a big deal. Although Ebola … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Zamansky 64: Notmuch Mail Client

Posted on 2020-01-19 by jcs

Mike Zamansky has another video up in his Using Emacs Series. This time it’s about the Notmuch email client and how it compares to mu4e. Zamansky uses mu4e for his work email and Gmail for his personal email but decided … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

How Fast Is Ripgrep?

Posted on 2020-01-18 by jcs

Very fast, it turns out. Arne Babenhauserheide has a great twitter thread on how fast ripgrep is: yes, this is “ripgrep is so fast that I can simply grep through 2 million lines of code for each line in this … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Quitting Google: A Story

Posted on 2020-01-17 by jcs

Regular readers know that I regularly reproach those who depend on Google apps. It’s not that I insist that everybody use open source exclusively—I don’t—but I find it excruciating to read about people committing the only copy their valuable data … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Online Shopping Experience

Posted on 2020-01-16 by jcs

I don’t usually indulge myself like this but the following so perfectly captures my experience of dealing with my health insurance provider yesterday that I couldn’t resist. The captcha and the ‘Contact Us’ button are perfect 😂😭 #digitalexperience pic.twitter.com/rlF57ICMjP — … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Using Org-mode To Capture and Report Git Commits

Posted on 2020-01-15 by jcs

Like most developers, Andrea Richiardi has a certain amount of logging and reporting he has to do to document his work. One such item is a report on the commits he’s made while working on various tickets. He wants to … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Little Improvements Add Up

Posted on 2020-01-14 by jcs

All Irreal readers, I’m sure, are familiar with the power of compounding if only because they know about “compound interest.” Every now and then, Paul Graham (re)tweets an interesting mathematical fact. The last example I wrote about is the fact … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Zamansky: ClojureScript 2

Posted on 2020-01-13 by jcs

I’ve written a few posts lately about working in the Slime and Geiser environments to write and experiment with Common Lisp and Scheme code. What’s great about them is that they enable an “interactive programming” style where you can try … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Ebook Stupidity

Posted on 2020-01-12 by jcs

I haven’t written about the publishing industry for some time but a recent post by hoakley over at The Eclectic Light Company has reignited my rage. Publishers have been doing things the same way for hundreds of years and don’t … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment