Mac to Linux: 1Password to KeePassX
I have too many passwords to remember, so I’ve been using a password manager for years. First there was Keyring for Palm OS, then 1Password on the Mac. 1Password’s a very polished commercial program,...
View ArticleCompose yourself, Raspberry Pi!
Years ago, I worked in multilingual dictionary publishing. I was on the computing team, so we had to support the entry and storage of text in many different languages. Computers could display accented...
View Articleclean up your GnuPG keyring
For reasons too annoying to explain, my GnuPG keyring was huge. It was taking a long time to find keys, and most of them weren’t ones I’d use. So I wrote this little script that strips out all of the...
View Articlefixing firefox’s fugly fonts on Ubuntu
Switching back to Linux from Mac is still a process of ironing out minor wrinkles. Take, for example, this abomination (enlarged to show texture):— … No, I’m not talking about Mr Paul’s antics (or the...
View ArticleUsing large format paper with Linux and the Epson WorkForce WF-7520 printer
I have an Epson WorkForce WF-7520, and I really like it: excellent built-in duplex large format scanner with ADF, CIFS network storage, giant paper bins, photo quality printing up to 330×482 mm, only...
View ArticleA (mostly) colour-managed workflow for Linux for not too many $$$
Colour management is good. It means that what I see on the screen is what you meant it to look like, and anything I make with a colour-managed workflow you’ll see in the colours I meant it to have....
View ArticleProtext lives!
Oh man, Protext! For years, it was all I used: every magazine article, every essay at university (all two of them), my undergraduate dissertation (now mercifully lost to time: The Parametric Design of...
View ArticleThe HP48: the best calculator ever
We had an unscheduled overnight stop in East Lansing last week, and I took the chance to visit the MSU Surplus Store. For $15, they had HP48G calculators, seemingly unused: They still have a bunch of...
View Articleelementary OS: could be worse
Imagine there’s a really nicely arranged screenshot of elementary OS here. You know, browser arranged just so, dock showing shiny icons, and a coy little dropdown showing that I’m playing music that’s...
View ArticleNotes on mini-printers and Linux
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing with a few small thermal printers. Meant as POS or information booth printers, they make a diverting project for the lo-fi printing enthusiast. While they all...
View Articlefun with darktable
I’m really impressed with darktable, a raw photo workflow for Linux. Unlike Gimp, it uses floating point for all image processes, so it doesn’t get caught up in quantization error. It’s a...
View ArticleCompose yourself, Raspberry Pi!
Years ago, I worked in multilingual dictionary publishing. I was on the computing team, so we had to support the entry and storage of text in many different languages. Computers could display accented...
View Articleclean up your GnuPG keyring
For reasons too annoying to explain, my GnuPG keyring was huge. It was taking a long time to find keys, and most of them weren’t ones I’d use. So I wrote this little script that strips out all of the...
View ArticleThermal Printer driver for CUPS, Linux, and Raspberry Pi: zj-58
This might be my last post on mini-printers, as I’ve found a driver that just works with CUPS on Raspberry Pi. It also works on Ubuntu on my laptop, and should work (though untried) on Mac OS. You’ll...
View ArticleWorking with case-sensitive CD-ROM images on Linux
I bought a CD-ROM, The World of Patterns. It’s supposed to work on ‘Any computer with an Internet browser and a CD-ROM drive’. Guess I don’t just have any computer, then … The disk — an interesting...
View Articlemicro, a nice little text editor
micro – https://github.com/zyedidia/micro – is a terminal-based text editor. Unlike vi, emacs and nano, it has sensible default command keys: Ctrl+S saves, Ctrl+Q quits, Ctrl+X/C/V cuts/copies/pastes,...
View Articlemaking an hourly chime with cron
I wanted to have a “Hey, be here now!” ping throughout the working day. Something loud enough to hear, but not irritating. Doing this with cron was harder than you might expect. It seems that sound is...
View ArticleSynthesizing simple chords with sox
SoX can do almost anything with audio files — including synthesize audio from scratch. Unfortunately, SoX’s syntax is more than a bit hard to follow, and the manual page isn’t the most clear. But there...
View ArticlePossibly Painless Network Printing from your Raspberry Pi
Printing from computers goes through waves of being difficult to being easy, then back to difficult again. This is likely due to the cycles of technology, complexity and user demand flow in and out of...
View ArticleAdding the date to Sony Mavica FD-91 images
20 years ago, this was one state-of-the-art brick: The only way to get pictures from it is via the floppy disk drive on the side. Then you’ve got a bunch of images with 8.3 filenames and the only...
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