Monthly Archives: March 2025

France Makes The Right Choice

Posted on 2025-03-31 by jcs

Some Americans like to make fun of the French but they’ve recently shown that they’ve got it together a lot more than many governments. The EFF is reporting that France recently rejected a backdoor mandate greatly desired by the Interior … Continue reading →

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Journelly Review

Posted on 2025-03-30 by jcs

I’ve written a couple of times about Álvaro Ramírez’s Journelly [1, 2] and how it seemed like a good fit for my memo book needs. In the last of those posts, Ramírez announced that he was starting an official beta … Continue reading →

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Configuring Emacs Garbage Collection

Posted on 2025-03-29 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov has posted another in his long list of informative Emacs posts. This time, it’s about configuring Emacs garbage collection. The principal way of doing that is to set gc-cons-threshold to a higher value than its default of 80000. … Continue reading →

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Standing Up To Patent Trolls

Posted on 2025-03-28 by jcs

Everybody here knows that Irreal doesn’t hold patent trolls in high regard. That’s me showing restraint. What I actually think is that they’re parasites that should wiped off the face of the earth in service of improving the commonweal. Still, … Continue reading →

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Smoother Scrolling

Posted on 2025-03-27 by jcs

Over at The MKat, Marie K. Ekeberg has a post that brings me back to my earliest days of using Emacs. Before I was assimilated, I tried several times to warm up to Emacs but it wouldn’t take. Ekeberg’s post … Continue reading →

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Save Early And Often

Posted on 2025-03-26 by jcs

Back in the bad old days when personal computers weren’t nearly as reliable as they are today, it was common to have your computer crash when you were right in the middle of writing a document. Because of that, a … Continue reading →

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Useful Latency Number For Programmers

Posted on 2025-03-25 by jcs

If you’ve been around Irreal for a while, you know that I like to read about the latency of various computer operations. I find it fascinating but one could say that the data is abstract and dismiss it as “interesting … Continue reading →

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The Ten Commandments Of The Church Of Emacs

Posted on 2025-03-24 by jcs

It’s Monday. Most of us are looking around bleary eyed wondering what happened to the weekend that just started. Here’s a little humor to get you warmed up for what’s to come. Over at the Emacs subreddit, bruchieOP posts the … Continue reading →

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Emacs Completion As A Game Changer

Posted on 2025-03-23 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, weevyl talks about how Emacs completion changed his life. Or at least his Emacs life. His story is about his repeated efforts to move to Emacs and always failing. He finally realized that the reason … Continue reading →

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Movement Commands

Posted on 2025-03-22 by jcs

Over that the Emacs reddit, arni_ca asks about key bindings for cursor movement. It’s not quite clear what he’s asking but the theme is moving the cursor without bindings like Ctrl+f, Ctrl+b, Meta+f, Meta+b, Ctrl+n, and Ctrl+p. As is often … Continue reading →

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