Well, not really. At least not how I tend to think of that word. What really happened is that I found a LaTeX package I like (sim-os-menus) but it didn’t behave the way I wanted it to, so I dug into the source code and figured out how to make it work the way I …read more…
Easy Spreadsheet Calendars with khal
A short time ago I needed to make a calendar in a spreadsheet in which all the months are situated vertically one after the other on the same sheet. There are two possible solutions here: Find a calendar for 2026 and then laboriously type in numbers. (And then laboriously go back and proofread the entire …read more…
Typesetting Sudoku Grids in LaTeX
I wanted to write some sudoku tutorials in LaTeX, but had to figure out how to draw the grids first. Turns out it’s super easy with Tikz, and even easier with LaTeX macros.
Managing your Ruby Version with rbenv
I use Git a lot. I’m not a terribly sophisticated user, because I don’t do a lot of branching. I mainly use it as a way to keep track of ongoing projects. But sometimes I need to do something a bit more complicated than I am used to and so I head over to the …read more…
Make Your Cursor (i.e., Mouse Pointer) Disappear in Linux (when you’re typing, that is)
One of the most annoying things I run into when using a computer is that I click in a box to start typing, and the cursor is blocking what I’m typing, so I can’t see it. (This also happens at work when I’m Windows 11.) It’s annoying, because sometimes I make a typo and I …read more…
Extract Audio from Video using ffmpeg
The great thing about using Linux is that you have a number of command line tools that can accomplish tasks and are generally faster than GUI-based alternatives. The Linux tool for manipulating video files is ffmpeg. Its official documentation is here and one version of the man file is here. General Use The format for …read more…
Adding Page Numbers to a PDF file
I create a lot of booklets. Usually, this is because it’s a great way for me to put together some files and take them with me. I can slip them in a briefcase or backpack, and pull them out to read whenever I have a few spare moments. I recently had a situation where I …read more…
Learning Linux by Studying the Man Pages
So I did a thing, and I posted it to Reddit: Most applications in Linux come with a man page—essentially, an online manual. You can invoke this for any installed app with man <application> where <application> is the name of the app in question. I will say that the quality (and size) of these vary by …read more…
Optimize a scanned pdf on Linux
I scanned a rather longish document (241 pages), which resulted in a 101.7 MB document. I needed to get the file size down, but couldn’t find a decent way. Finally, after quite a bit of googling, I found this link. I don’t know why, but it worked. It got that 101.7 MB document down to …read more…
