Monthly Archives: January 2026

Revisiting The 500 Mile Email

Posted on 2026-01-31 by jcs

Someone reposted Trey Harris’ famous story about the 500 mile email. The TL;DR is that Harris, working as a university system administrator, received a call from the Statistics Department claiming that they couldn’t send an email further than about 500 … Continue reading →

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Extracting Data From Journelly Entries

Posted on 2026-01-30 by jcs

As you all know, I am always writing about how much I like and use Journelly. One of the things that I always say is that since Journelly saves it data as an Org mode file—or, if you prefer, as … Continue reading →

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Return Of The Prodigal Son

Posted on 2026-01-29 by jcs

Well, not really prodigal, but the return—nonetheless—of a son assumed lost. Michał Sapka has a blog post about his return to Emacs. A while ago, Sapka left Emacs for Vim and the shell. He liked them but realized that Emacs … Continue reading →

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Kitty Cards

Posted on 2026-01-28 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez and Vaarnan Drolia have introduced a really interesting app. At least I guess you would call it an app. It’s actually just a Web page that lets you build your own custom Apple Wallet cards. It’s easy to … Continue reading →

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Gruber On File Saving Ease

Posted on 2026-01-27 by jcs

John Gruber, over at Daring Fireball has a post, Untitled Document Syndrome, that makes two points of interest to Irreal readers. The first involves the difficulty of initially saving what he calls “untitled documents”. He’s writing about macOS, of course, … Continue reading →

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Starting A Journal

Posted on 2026-01-26 by jcs

A couple of weeks ago I read a lovely story in The New Yorker by Calvin Tompkins about starting a journal in his hundredth year. Tompkins was born the same year that The New Yorker was founded and, ironically, spent … Continue reading →

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Emacs Performance on macOS

Posted on 2026-01-25 by jcs

Does Emacs run slower on macOS than it does on a similar machine running Linux? I don’t know. I’ve been running Emacs almost exclusively on macOS for somewhere around 17 years so its performance on macOS, whatever it is, seems … Continue reading →

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Microsoft 365

Posted on 2026-01-24 by jcs

I was going to make the fact that Microsoft 365 and other Microsoft tools are down into a Red Meat Friday post with a title that included the word “schadenfreude” but my better nature prevailed and I forebore. Today, though, … Continue reading →

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Casual EWW

Posted on 2026-01-23 by jcs

You’ve all heard me moan many times about my failure to bring my last remaining significant application—Web browsing—into Emacs. There are some solutions but none of them come close to being sufficient. If you want full featured browsing, you’re mostly … Continue reading →

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When Should You Use Visual-line-mode?

Posted on 2026-01-22 by jcs

Over at the Emacs subreddit, floofcode complains that he doesn’t like the way visual-line-mode handles moving from line to line. He found that everything worked fine without visual-line-mode so he wondered when is visual-line-mode useful. If you read his post, … Continue reading →

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