Opera was updated. They messed up. Let's not talk about this any more. Let's talk about how to make Firefox your new Opera 12. To get the elephant out of the room right away: Yes, you guessed right, I did not switch to Chrome because I am scared of Google harvesting all my data and browsing habits. So that leaves only Firefox, and I think that they did good with the recent releases. We probably can not get back everything we miss from Opera 12 times, but some of it is possible, and even better in Firefox. First of all, Firefox has bookmarks and you can import them from an HTML export of your old bookmarks. For everything else, continue reading. If you are still missing a feature, feel free to post it with or without solution - in the latter case, I will try and solve it myself.
(more…)
Well. In case you have not stumbled across the corresponding StackOverflow post, and if you have always wondered why vim does not work properly in cygwin, just
[rattle@ALICE:~]$ cat .vimrc
set nocompatible
set backspace=indent,eol,start
A lot of people are in the situation where they want to use more than one Dropbox account on one (windows) machine (for whatever reason). The default way of doing this is the following:
* create a new local user account
* log in as that user and install Dropbox
* log back in as the default user and use something like psexec to execute the installed Dropbox as the other user account while being logged in as default user
To automate this process, I wrote the following script that also takes care of cosmetics like "hiding the newly created user from the login screen".
Do you want to know more?
Hetzner has a webinterface to manage DNS zonefiles. Since their API does not support the management of zonefiles I decided to write a small python script that does the job ((There actually is a perl script that claims to do the same but it has the (long expired) "session id" hard coded I think.)). You can download it on github (use it at your own risk and read the code if you want to be sure). (more…)
Most of you have probably heard of the new technology under the name 'Spritz' that allegedly enables you to read at a multiple of your usual pace. The concept is neither very new nor very complicated: Whenever we read a text, we do not scan every word, letter by letter, from left to right. Instead we focus on a single point for each word (apparently this point is after roughly one third of the word) and scan the whole thing in one go. So when we read text in the usual way, our eyes have to jump all over the place, trying to focus on the right spots and waste an awful lot of time in the process. The concept of Spritz is that you can focus at a single point on your screen and the app feeds you the words, one by one and in the right position. You can relax and let the words spritz into your eyes at high speed (yes, I went there).
Since the idea is so simple, many different speed-readers (that's the general term that seems to have established itself) were published during the last few weeks. My goal was to find a nice speed-reader extension for my browser. Eventually I was successful and learned quite a bit in the process. As requested I'll guide you through it:
(more…)
Ich habe endlich herausgefunden, wie man auch die letzten merkwürdigen Autovervollständigungen von TexStudio eliminert. Das Problem ensteht vor allem mit deutschen Tastaturen, da man häufig Ctrl+Alt noch gedrückt hat, wenn man die Leertaste betätigt, etwa nachdem man eine schließende, geschweifte Klammer (Ctrl+Alt+0 liefert }) eingegeben hat. Dies hat in der TexStudio Standardkonfiguration zur Folge, dass ein
\begin{ im Text eingefügt wird. Wie schaltet man das aus? So:
* TexStudio konfigurieren
* Tastenkürzel
* Menüs
* Idefix
* Vervollständige
* Den \begin{ Vervollständigungs-Hotkey löschen
Es könnte noch andere Ctrl+Alt-Makros dieser Art geben, die man löschen sollte. Ich werde diesen Post updaten, wenn mir weitere unterkommen.
I was pointed to the cool rsync-backup script which uses cygwin's rsync and hardlinks in NTFS to provide a method for incremental backups which is probably the best I have seen so far. Basically, the effect is as follows: Whenever you backup your data to the backup location (which is somewhere on an NTFS drive), the only actual data that will be copied is for the files that have changed since the last backup. Nevertheless, there will be a new folder in your backup location which contains all files and folders you just backed up. Just: Those that did not change have not been copied, they have just been hardlinked to the old files instead. Now here comes the best part: The actual contents of a file with more than one hardlink to it are deleted only after the last link to it has been removed. Thus, you can delete old backups and the only data that will actually be deleted is the old data, the data that changed in later backups.
Now, I modified the script slightly to better suit my needs. First of all, I only back up a single folder. If you want to backup multiple folders to a single location, move along. This is not for you. Use the original rsync-backup if you wish. Mine is different.
Do you want to know more?
I've had an Android phone for quite some time now. I do not want to give *anyone* my personal contacts. However, I want to synchronize my contacts across devices. So I used the *MyPhoneExplorer* to manually sync my contacts between the phone and all my three clients. Since this is a pain in the ass, I was looking for an alternate solution.
Do you want to know how I did it?
I recently bought an Android phone. I do not want to give anyone my calendar data. However, I want to synchronize my calendar across devices. So I did it.
Do you want to know how I did it?
I was cleaning up my LaTeX header and re-coded some macros to suit my needs better. I have always had a macro called
\of which takes one parameter. It used to be the very simple macro
\newcommand{\of}[1]{\left(#1\right)}
\of[big]{\sum} will expand to \bigl(\sum\bigr). Sometimes I even want it not to do any resizing of the brackets at all. The correct way to do this is is \csname and \endcsname which allows you to delay expansion of a macro. Inside a macro definition, the command
\newcommand{\ar}[1]{\csname#1arrow\endcsname}
\ar{right} is first made into \rightarrow and then expanded. We will use that to make \bigl and \bigr out of the argument big, for instance.
Do you want to know more?
Nikolai asked me how to open a Python interpreter prompt from the console with a certain module already imported. For the record, the Python command line switches tell us that
python -i -m module is the way to start the prompt and load module.py. That made me wonder whether I can stuff it all into one batch file, and I came up with the following test.bat:
REM = '''
@COPY %0.bat %0.py
@python %0.py
@DEL %0.py
@goto :eof ::'''
del REM
for k in range(70):
print(k)
test.py, then launch python with this argument. Afterwards, test.py is deleted and the script terminates without looking at any of the following lines. Note that :: is yet another way to comment in Batch. Python, however, will see a script where the variable REM is defined as a multi-line string and deleted right after that. After this little stub, you can put any python code you want. Well. I thought it was funky.