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Tag Archives: geek

Python datetime conversions

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Recently for my work I had to do some date/time-wrangling in Python. We have a database containing unix timestamp values, and the front-end application needs to talk local time. The necessary conversions aren’t so complicated, but Python makes life a bit harder by having three relevant modules, three relevant data types (not matching the modules), [...]

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Ubuntu on Dell Precision: driver problems with easy fixes

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Yesterday I installed Ubuntu 10.04 (“Lucid Lynx”) on my brand-new Dell Precision M4500. Not everything went smoothly: I had driver problems that left me with a blank screen and no wireless. There are simple fixes for these problems but Google was only giving me more complicated technical ones. Maybe this post will help someone in [...]

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Emacs 23 magic

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Anyone else using emacs 23 yet? Here’s something awesome I stumbled on by accident: try to open a pdf from inside emacs. Go on, go and try, I’ll wait. Neato, huh?

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Another typogeek tee

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Mule design studio have a design I like: Pretty funny if the association is familiar. Otherwise, probably pretty incomprehensible. [via]

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Discoveries: stumpwm and screen-profiles

Saturday, May 16, 2009

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, [...]

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In which I learn things about TeX

Monday, April 27, 2009

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 [...]

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Pdf shuffling in LaTeX

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

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, [...]

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Two kinds of ebooks

Saturday, March 21, 2009

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 [...]

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Dumb DRM arguments: ebooks are not music

Friday, March 13, 2009

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 [...]

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Downtime, fixed (wp-cache and dreamhost)

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Apologies for the downtime, if anyone noticed. Short explanation (i.e., geekery) follows.

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