Monthly Archives: September 2024

An Early Emacs Paper

Posted on 2024-09-16 by jcs

For those of you interested in the history of Emacs, how it all started, and where it got its name, here is an original document from 1979 written by Richard Stallman that describers the new Emacs system. I found the … Continue reading →

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Some Notes On The Culture

Posted on 2024-09-15 by jcs

Virtually everyone here knows that I’m a huge fan of Iain M Banks’ Culture novels. Indeed, the name “Irreal” comes from an idea in his 1996 novel, Excession. I’ve read all the Culture novels except the last one, which I’m … Continue reading →

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Org For Writing And More

Posted on 2024-09-14 by jcs

Aditya Athalye has a nice post on how he uses Org-mode for writing and more. Like most Org users he started using it for a single task and discovered, as he went along, that he could also use it for … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: A Poetic Incursion Into The Editor Wars

Posted on 2024-09-13 by jcs

Here’s a bit of Friday Red Meat for all you Emacs partisans in the eternal editor holy war. Before you flame me, please keep in mind that I was a long time Vim user and often write approvingly of it. … Continue reading →

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Emacs Pretest 30.0.91

Posted on 2024-09-12 by jcs

Andrea Corallo has just announced that the first Emacs 30 pretest (30.0.91) is available for download and testing. You can check the NEWS file to see what’s new in the release. As always, thanks to Eli, Andrea, and all the … Continue reading →

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Casual Symbol Overlay

Posted on 2024-09-11 by jcs

A couple of months ago, I wrote about Álvaro Ramírez’s gluing together of Symbol Overlay and Multiple Cursors. I was really taken with Symbol Overlay and its ability to select a given symbol for further actions. There are many possible … Continue reading →

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Branch Prediction

Posted on 2024-09-10 by jcs

Here’s a very nice discussion of branch prediction from a Stack Overflow question. We graybeards and, really, just about everyone else like to pretend that all processors are still like the PDP-11. They were easy to understand and their semantics … Continue reading →

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Babel and Python

Posted on 2024-09-09 by jcs

This is a sort of Public Service Announcement. One of the great things about Org mode is the code block where you can run code in an Org buffer and have the results inserted into the Org document. I use … Continue reading →

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Using .authinfo With Org Code Blocks

Posted on 2024-09-08 by jcs

As most of you know, I’m a big fan of using literate programming techniques in the context of what might be described as “devops”. The technique boils down to writing an Org file with code blocks that document how you … Continue reading →

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Converting Between Miles and Kilometers

Posted on 2024-09-07 by jcs

Peteris Krumins has a nice post on using Fibonacci numbers to covert between miles and kilometers. The TL;DR is that if you take any two consecutive Fibonacci numbers, X and Y, there will be approximately Y kilometers in X miles … Continue reading →

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