Monthly Archives: March 2025

Calle 24

Posted on 2025-03-11 by jcs

If you’re an Irreal regular, you’ve probably guessed that I’m a fan of Charles Choi and his work. He even got me to change my mind about using proportional text for writing blogs—an idea I was initially resistant to—and marginally … Continue reading →

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Happy 52nd Birthday To Dark Side Of The Moon

Posted on 2025-03-10 by jcs

It’s that time of year again. Once again Irreal pays tribute to the greatest album of all time: The Dark Side of the Moon. It’s no secret that we here at Irreal are serious fans of Pink Floyd and their … Continue reading →

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Age Verification

Posted on 2025-03-09 by jcs

I often say on Irreal that any time you hear the phrase “think of the children” you should check to make sure you still have your wallet. It’s a favorite locution of scoundrels who want to steal not your wallet … Continue reading →

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The Power Of Elfeed

Posted on 2025-03-08 by jcs

Yesterday’s Red Meat Friday post on Why Lisp “Lost” has a backstory. As I often do, I wrote it the night before and had it queued up for publication on Friday. But I also like to read through the posts … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Why Lisp “Lost”

Posted on 2025-03-07 by jcs

Back in 2018, Steve Losh wrote a very nice, long post on A Road to Common Lisp. If you’re a Lisper, it’s well worth reading. Recently, Alexander_Selkirk posted, without comment, a link to that post. The last time I wrote … Continue reading →

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EWS: The Talk And The Book

Posted on 2025-03-06 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, Hungry-Accountant-99 has an interesting post about Peter Prevos’ Emacs Writing Studio (EWS). I’ve written about EWS before [1, 2, 3] and have always found it an interesting project. Prevos gave a talk at EmacsConf 2024 … Continue reading →

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Remember Mode

Posted on 2025-03-05 by jcs

One of the things I’m always looking for is an easy way to take quick notes. Currently, I handle this with various Org capture buffers: one for temporary notes and another to capture notes for my journal when I want … Continue reading →

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ESC as Meta

Posted on 2025-03-04 by jcs

Almost every Emacs user knows that you can use Esc as the Meta key. It started because keyboards between, say, the Space Cadet keyboard and modern keyboards didn’t have an Alt key to act as Meta. The practice lives on. … Continue reading →

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Is Emacs Privacy Friendly?

Posted on 2025-03-03 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, Tb12s46 asks if Emacs is privacy friendly. By that he means does Emacs collect telemetry or otherwise spy on its users. On its face, the question has an easy answer. Of course Emacs doesn’t do … Continue reading →

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More On Emacs Debugging

Posted on 2025-03-02 by jcs

A month ago, I wrote about Bozhidar Batsov’s post on debugging in Emacs. The idea was simple: if Emacs got an error, you could turn on debug-on-error and rerun the offending command. When the error occurs, Emacs will produce a … Continue reading →

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