Author Archives: jcs

An Emacs Based Writerdeck

Posted on 2026-06-11 by jcs

If you follow writers at all, you’ll have noticed that many prefer to write their prose in long hand even if they began their writing career with a computer. Tess Gerretsen and Neal Stephenson are two examples that come to … Continue reading →

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Emacs In Pop Culture

Posted on 2026-06-10 by jcs

Ian Pan has curated a nice collection of Emacs caught in the wild. By “in the wild” I mean “in popular culture”: things like movies and comics. Most of us have seen the familiar scene from Tron but Pan has … Continue reading →

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The First Wireless Telephone

Posted on 2026-06-09 by jcs

A short quiz in two parts for you: When was the first wireless telephone invented? Who invented it? The answers are surprising and not at all what you might have expected. If you’re like me, something involving radio is probably … Continue reading →

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Elfeed 4.0.0

Posted on 2026-06-08 by jcs

Daniel Mendler, who took over as maintainer of the world’s best RSS reader, Elfeed, has announced the release of Elfeed 4.0.0. You can read the Change File to see what’s new but the most important point for me is that … Continue reading →

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Correcting The Orientation of macOS Photos on Linux

Posted on 2026-06-07 by jcs

JTR over at The Art Of Not Asking Why describes a problem—and its resolution—that I didn’t know existed. The TL;DR is that photographs taken with an iPhone are always captured in landscape mode but Apple’s software detects portrait photos and … Continue reading →

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Emacs 31.0.90 Pretest

Posted on 2026-06-06 by jcs

Sean Whitton writes to tell us that the first Emacs 31 pretest, emacs.31.0.90, is available for download. It’s been almost two years since the first Emacs 30 pretest came out so we’re pretty much on schedule for our yearly major … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Score One For The Luddites

Posted on 2026-06-05 by jcs

As many of you know, I have a special contempt for what I call “the new Luddites”: those who find (nonsensical) fault—usually for performative reasons—with technology. The most common current sign of the new Ludditism today is giving up smart … Continue reading →

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Inhibit The Mouse In Emacs

Posted on 2026-06-04 by jcs

James Cherti has a new version (Release 1.0.4) of his inhibit-mouse package available. As the name suggests, it disables the mouse while you’re using Emacs. I’ve written about inhibit-mouse before. As I said in my previous post my first thought … Continue reading →

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Writing Is Like Science

Posted on 2026-06-03 by jcs

Rachel Yang is a studying to be a research scientist. She’s currently a Ph.D. student at MIT but has already worked on some projects leading to breakthroughs. She tells the story of the first such project when she was an … Continue reading →

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Sdcv-quick Update

Posted on 2026-06-02 by jcs

Years ago, when I learned from mbork how to get my own copy of Webster’s 1923 dictionary my dictionary use was vastly improved. If you don’t know why having Webster’s 1923 is a big thing, here’s my original post on … Continue reading →

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