Monthly Archives: December 2020

Bozhidar Batsov’s Favorite Packages

Posted on 2020-12-11 by jcs

We all have our favorite Emacs packages. I’ve written about mine a few times (1, 2, 3). A few packages make almost everyone’s list. There’s Magit and Org-mode, of course. Many people say at least one of those is the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Threading Macros in Elisp

Posted on 2020-12-10 by jcs

As I’ve mentioned in some recent posts, Mike Zamansky is making his annual pilgrimage to the Advent of Code Website to try his hand at the problems. This year—so far, at least—he’s been using Clojure to solve the problems. I … Continue reading →

Posted in General, Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

This Is Tech Journalism

Posted on 2020-12-09 by jcs

Even casual readers know that Irreal holds a generally dim view of journalists. But this isn’t another post about their bias and ignorance of their subject matter. This is a post about silliness masquerading as serious journalism. It’s about writing … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Social Life of Forests

Posted on 2020-12-08 by jcs

With a couple of exceptions—like Dawkins’ /The Selfish Gene/—Biology has never held the fascination for me that many other subjects do. Nonetheless, I was drawn to The New York Times Magazine article, The Social Life of Forests. The TL;DR is … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

LaTeX vs. Word Redux

Posted on 2020-12-07 by jcs

Hey, remember that silly opinion piece masquerading as a scientific paper by Knauff and Nejasmic back in 2014? It claimed that Word was much more efficient than LaTeX for writing papers. I wrote about it more than once (1, 2, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Phone Notifications When a Command Completes

Posted on 2020-12-06 by jcs

Before we get to today’s topic, I want to point you to Mike Zamansky’s latest video on using Clojure for Advent of Code problems. Emacs appears, of course, although it’s not really the point of the video. Even so, I … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Zamansky: More Advent of Code and Clojure

Posted on 2020-12-05 by jcs

If you enjoyed yesterday’s post on Mike Zamansky’s use of Clojure and Cider to solve an Advent of Code problem, he has a couple more offerings that you’ll probably like too. Like his last video, these two consider a current … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Zamansky on Clojure and Cider

Posted on 2020-12-04 by jcs

Mike Zamansky has another video up. It’s not quite one of his Using Emacs Series videos but he says it could be as it discusses the Emacs Cider infrastructure. It’s ostensibly about day 3 of this year’s Advent of Code, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Repeating Commands in Emacs

Posted on 2020-12-03 by jcs

One of the things that Vi/Vim does much better than Emacs is repeat commands. Pressing . in Vim repeats the last native command. It simple and easy to use and when I was a Vim user, I did, in fact, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The DEA Supplies Another Example

Posted on 2020-12-02 by jcs

Speaking of governments supplying examples of the Iron Law of Data Collection, one of the US Government’s most notorious abusers of data collection and constitutional protections whose TLA is not NSA, has stepped up to provide yet another example. The … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment