Monthly Archives: June 2021

Punch Cards

Posted on 2021-06-30 by jcs

It’s likely that very few Irreal readers have ever used punch cards or maybe even know what they are. Nevertheless, they were once the mainstay of the computer industry. Indeed, IBM started out as a company that made punch-card-tabulating machines … Continue reading →

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Another Reason Elfeed Is The Best RSS Reader

Posted on 2021-06-29 by jcs

As you all know, I’m a big fan of Chris Wellons’ Elfeed package for reading my RSS feed. There’s a lot to like. Wellons reimagined what an RSS reader should be and organized it around search. Most of the time, … Continue reading →

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Lisp and Replace-Regexp

Posted on 2021-06-28 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez has a nice post that reminds us of one of those things you don’t need very often but when you do it’s exactly the right tool. Emacs has many ways of doing mass replacements but one of the … Continue reading →

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The Evolution of Unix

Posted on 2021-06-27 by jcs

I’ve written about Diomidis Spinellis and his wonderful Unix repository before. It’s a single place you can go to get most of the publicly available Unix source code. As I’ve said previously, one of the best ways of becoming a … Continue reading →

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Innovation at the Office

Posted on 2021-06-26 by jcs

COVID-19 has dramatically reset worker expectations. Prepandemic, most people just assumed being in an office was part of having a job. Now, however, those workers have seen how well working from home works—especially for them—and many of them say they’ll … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Unintended Consequences

Posted on 2021-06-25 by jcs

Irreal readers are, I’m sure, smarter than the average politico so they would know better than to pass a law like this Colorado bill without considering the consequences. On its face, the law doesn’t seem controversial; it’s just a little … Continue reading →

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Technology Saves the World

Posted on 2021-06-24 by jcs

Everything you read about tech these days is more or less a screed on the evils of the technology community. The smugly ignorant journalists of the tech press, most of whom wouldn’t know code from a cod, float every conceivable … Continue reading →

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The New Luddites on the Apple Wallet

Posted on 2021-06-23 by jcs

As I wrote yesterday, Apple is rolling out several enhancements to Apple Wallet. That represents technological progress so of course the new Luddites have taken offense and have rushed to publish articles denouncing it. The problem is that it’s hard … Continue reading →

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The Digital Wallet Moves Forward

Posted on 2021-06-22 by jcs

Those of you who have been hanging around for a while know of my obsession with digital wallets and reducing my everyday carry to just my iPhone. There’s been a lot of progress since I first wrote about it. Almost … Continue reading →

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Demonstration of Dired Video

Posted on 2021-06-21 by jcs

Like most Emacs users, I consider Dired the way of dealing with file operations. That means a lot coming from me because I’m an old timer used to dealing with such things from the command line. But even after a … Continue reading →

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