Monthly Archives: May 2020

The NYT and Customer Surveillance

Posted on 2020-05-21 by jcs

Irreal has been railing against adtech and the malware that advertisers download onto our computers to facilitate their tracking for a long time. Despite pretty compelling evidence that it doesn’t work, its use continues unabated. There is, however, a modicum … Continue reading →

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Advanced Usage of the Org Agenda

Posted on 2020-05-20 by jcs

A great deal of my Emacs tube time is spent displaying the Org agenda. My use of the agenda is probably not standard: I use it mainly as a portal into my log type entries. There are some TODO entries … Continue reading →

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Setting the Initial Visibility of Magit Sections

Posted on 2020-05-19 by jcs

Like most Emacsers, I very seldom restart Emacs. When I do it’s usually because I just finished my weekly ELPA update. Despite my extensive configuration, Emacs starts up reasonably quickly for me but I still hate restarting it. The major … Continue reading →

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Work From Home Surveillance

Posted on 2020-05-18 by jcs

Speaking of the downsides of working from home, NPR and CNBC have horrifying stories about the anal micromanagers requiring workers to install spyware on their computer and even their phones so they can track their every movement, keystroke, and mouse … Continue reading →

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Roam Research

Posted on 2020-05-17 by jcs

Those of you who have been paying attention know that I’m embarking on a project to implement a Zettelkasten to organize my notes and ideas. My current plan is to base this on Jethro Kuan’s org-roam. Org-roam is an Emacs … Continue reading →

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Emacs By Macros 6

Posted on 2020-05-16 by jcs

Sahas Subramanian is back with another excellent episode of learning Emacs through keyboard macros. This video covers editing macros to correct or change a macro without starting over. If you have a long and complicated macro, that can be a … Continue reading →

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Manhattan and Working From Home

Posted on 2020-05-15 by jcs

Irreal readers know that I’ve been fascinated with remote work for a long time and consider it a good thing for most people and the companies they work for. COVID-19 has accelerated the trend as many companies—and their employees—discover that … Continue reading →

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Zamansky 71: Openwith

Posted on 2020-05-14 by jcs

Mike Zamansky, freshly back from a bout with COVID-19, has a new video in his Using Emacs Series that considers the openwith package. The backstory is a long standing annoyance in Zamansky’s workflow: although he can open non-text files such … Continue reading →

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Digital Payments in Developing Countries

Posted on 2020-05-13 by jcs

As all of you know by now, I’m a big fan of the digital lifestyle but I have a first-world perspective. I want to be able to use Apple pay because it’s easier and I don’t have to carry around … Continue reading →

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Better Emacs Configuration with use-package

Posted on 2020-05-12 by jcs

Menno Finlay-Smits has an interesting post on using John Wiegley’s use-package package. It’s a fairly short post but Finlay-Smits makes a good case that the package make Emacs configuration cleaner and easier. As he also points out, it’s easy to … Continue reading →

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