Entries Tagged 'Geek' ↓
September 29th, 2009 — Geek, LaTeX
I’m under strict instructions that the article I’m currently writing should be under 11,000 words. How to keep track of that while using LaTeX (with a lot of mark-up commands that won’t be separate words in the final product and a full bibliography that doesn’t get compiled until the pdf gets produced and thus is not in reflected in the length of the source file)? Easy, run pdflatex on the source (including the bibliography compilation) and count the words in the resulting pdf. But how does that work? My installation includes a ghostscript utility called ps2ascii (I assume that came with MacTex). So, it really is trivial; in Terminal:
ps2ascii test.pdf | wc -w
Answer: 10198. Whew! Still in the game.
September 29th, 2009 — Geek, Life
This is cool and these features are very cool indeed:
- Honk your Zipcar’s horn with your iPhone to find it in a crowd
- Unlock and lock your Zipcar with your iPhone after scanning your Zipcard at the start of each reservation
January 8th, 2009 — Geek, Personal, Semantics
These days, I really don’t have all that much time to maintain my web presence the way I used to, what with two paying jobs and all kinds of volunteer work. So, it is time to consolidate my personal web presence into this one site. I will continue to post notes about my field, about academic geekery, and about (parts of) my life, but they will now all appear here.
If you are subscribed to an RSS feed from one of my old sites, those should continue to work. If you want to subscribe to this site, there are a number of choices:
March 9th, 2008 — Mac OS X
The well-heeled geek of course streams music from iTunes to their stereo via Apple’s AirPort Express/AirTunes gadgetry. An alternative is to stream music to your TiVo box using TiVo Desktop, which installs as a System Preference Pane on OS X. This works well — you can show slideshows of your photos in your iPhoto collection and stream MP3s from iTunes. The problem is that even the newest version of TiVo Desktop (1.9.3 for OS X) doesn’t handle AAC-encoded music, but that’s the default format that you get when you rip CDs into iTunes. It’s also the format that you get when you buy music from the iTunes Store. One can tell iTunes to rip music into MP3s but there is another option.
If you install LAME, which is an open source MP3 (en/de)coder, TiVo Desktop will use it to convert AAC files into MP3s on the fly and stream them to the TiVo box. One can get the latest source for LAME from the SourceForge site for the project. It compiles out of the box (I think) with the usual encantations (./configure and make and sudo make install). One can also find OS X binaries, but what I did is to have installed by the MacPorts system.
Once the program was installed (MacPorts install into /opt/local/bin/lame, but TiVo expects it in /usr/local/bin/lame, so I had to create a symlink), I could stream my ripped music to the TiVo box. This still doesn’t let you stream music bought from the iTunes Store but it’s a start.
I found this tip on MacGeekery where it was posted without acknowledging the source but the hack seems to have been discovered by Dennis Wilkinson as posted to the TiVo Community forums.
One last hitch: the first time I did this on my Intel MacBook Pro, all I got was static. The solution was to save the following script as /Library/Application Support/TiVo/lame and make it executable:
!/bin/sh
exec /usr/local/bin/lame -x $*
October 29th, 2007 — Mac OS X
The new version of the Mac OS X operating system is now available. Normally, I’m a very early adopter with new software like this. But this time, I’m just too busy with work and will need to wait for the winter break. I can’t wait! In the mean time, John Siracusa’s review at Ars Technica is a great read.
October 17th, 2007 — LaTeX
There is a much expanded second edition of The LaTeX Graphics Companion. It has a chapter on Beamer presentations, which I look forward to reading, even though the Beamer manual is itself a great piece of work. It doesn’t seem to treat PGF and TikZ, which would be my choice, if I had to produce heavy duty graphics.
The book apparently was threatening to burst at the seams, so the two chapters on PostScript fonts and PostScript drivers and tools, updated and expanded with information on TrueType, Opentype fonts, and PDF utilities, are freely available online. A quick look shows some really good information on fonts in LaTeX.
October 5th, 2007 — LaTeX
[Old post retrieved for Thony:]
There is a LaTeX package at CTAN that might be useful for class handouts etc.: sectionbox.
This collection of files contains a LaTeX package for sections surrounded by fancy boxes, primarily intended for use within posters
(e.g. made with sciposter.cls). A (pdf) manual is included as well.
August 21st, 2007 — Mac OS X
TextExpander, the typing utility that helps users save time and keystrokes by typing short abbreviations that expand into frequently used text snippets, is on sale (regular price: $29.95, with special 40% academic discount: $17.97). Highly recommended.
August 20th, 2007 — LaTeX
Among the alternatives to the LaTeX default font Computer Modern, one of the nicest is the Lucida family.
The TeX user group has offered the fonts at a discount for members for a while now. They charge $90 for members for the complete set (the non-member price is $140).
An alternative vendor is PCTeX, who normally charge $129 for the complete set of Lucida fonts. PCTeX has an “academic price” of $99, which is almost as good as the TUG-membership price.
But what occasioned this particular post is that PCTeX is offering a special sale right now: $79 as the academic price for the complete set of Lucida fonts.
[I already have the fonts and use them for some projects, e.g. the circulation manuscript of this paper.]
August 13th, 2007 — Mac OS X
A new Mac OS X hint suggests the following defaults change:
defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8"
Why? Because Windows email clients may display messages originating from Apple Mail much more faithfully. And in any case, everybody should be using UTF-8 anyway.