Apparently my family don’t understand anything I write on this blog any more. This post isn’t going to help. The good news is, I’ve got a bundle of photos from Stockholm which I hope to put up sometime over the weekend. Travels in Scandinavia, that’s not geeky at all, right?
This, on the other hand, is.
Apparently a local texmf tree no longer requires the ls-R file. Since how long, I know not, nor care I particularly. Nor expect I you to care, particularly, but I was tickled by it. Yet another piece of obscurity and complication getting slightly simpler in the LaTeX world.
(Thanks to Micha — I discovered this while [...]
Pdfpages is a LaTeX package that lets you drop individual pages of other pdfs into your LaTeX documents. Put it together with the \foreach command provided by pgf/TikZ, and you can get quite a bit done very simply.
For instance, you can scan in somebody’s photocopy of a paper from 1978 using the office printer, which [...]
Suvudu.com recently gave away a bunch of ebooks1 in pdf format. I was pretty surprised by the reaction: people were angry because the free stuff wasn’t the right free stuff. They didn’t want pdf, that was pretty clear. Now suvudu are offering a bunch of other formats, but it got me thinking about why I [...]
I’d like to celebrate read-an-ebook week with something positive, but I don’t have anything even half-prepared except some thoughts about DRM. That’s bad enough, but I won’t even be arguing against DRM for ebooks. I certainly won’t argue for it — I’m against the idea on principle, so if I thought it through and concluded that it was actually a [...]
Apologies for the downtime, if anyone noticed. Short explanation (i.e., geekery) follows.
Irregular Life is a flash game which will get you addicted to Conway’s Game of Life. I played to about level 15 just by symmetry-guessing –you see three gaps in a pattern and you’ve got three squares to place– so it’s not that hard, at least in those early levels. That’s not really the point, [...]
… Explained in Words of One Syllable, by George Boolos (not Boole).
If it could be proved that two plus two is five, then it could be proved that five is not five, and then there would be no claim that could not be proved, and math would be a lot of bunk.
If you’ve got access [...]
We’re back from Greece with many photos and stories, which I’ll start putting online in the weekend. For now, a geek-out interlude, mixing work-in-progress from the office (not my own work, admittedly, but the desk next door) and beer.
Ok, it’s via BoingBoing, but it’s too cool not to share. A stop-motion Mario Brothers sequence in lego, with music by recorder and sound effects by voice. Delightful.