Posts
Disabling multiple downloads in apt
The apt-based package managers and update managers in Ubuntu and Linux Mint will open multiple connections to repository servers in order to download several packages simultaneously. Unfortunately, the multiple connections cause our old DSL modem (a Westell 6100) to hang. At a former workplace, similar problems occurred with the corporate firewall.
February 6, 2016
Word processors considered harmful (part 2)
Several months ago, I wrote about the considerable drawbacks of using word processors. A few years ago I started searching for a replacement for Sprint that would run on Linux: a non-WYSIWYG text formatting system that would allow me to use my favorite editor and focus on writing instead of typesetting and formatting.
January 7, 2016
Fixing a dehydrator
Our Nesco deyhydrator gets heavy use in the summer, drying fruits, vegetables and even complete meals for future use in winter or on camping trips. This simple device consists of a number of plastic mesh-bottomed trays that stack on top of a ventilated base. On top of the stack is a lid that contains a heating element and a fan. This last summer, the deyhydrator suddenly stopped working in the middle of the night.
December 31, 2015
Converting Gallery2 albums
As mentioned earlier, converting Gallery2 albums to nanoc-based albums involves a great deal of error-prone typing. To save some of this effort, I wrote a Ruby script that reads a Gallery2 database and outputs album descriptions in the format that I defined for use with nanoc.
December 30, 2015
Replacing Gallery2 with nanoc
For many years, this site has used Gallery2 to provide photo albums. This large piece of PHP works well, but it has many of the same disadvantages as Wordpress
December 28, 2015
Installing and using a new Ruby on Linux Mint 17
Linux Mint 17 (and its parent, Ubuntu 14.04) ships with Ruby 2.0.0. This is a pretty old version of the language, and recent versions, especially 2.2, have numerous performance improvements. Fortunately, it’s easy to install and use the latest Ruby,
December 15, 2015
Converting from Wordpress to nanoc
For seven years this site has been using Wordpress as its main engine. There are a number of advantages to using this feature-rich piece of PHP, but I finally decided that the disadvantages were enough for me to switch to a static web site generator called nanoc .
November 15, 2015
Creating business cards with Gimp and ImageMagick
In the search for ways to create business cards on Linux, I came across a couple of useful items from the GimpWimp. First, a video showing how to use the Gimp to copy and paste a business card into a template for printing a sheet of ten cards
August 29, 2015
Extracting text from image-only PDF files
Sometimes I obtain scanned books in PDF format, in which each page is simply an image, not text. But it would handy to use OCR to extract the text from these images.
May 7, 2015
Word processors considered harmful (part 1)
It almost goes without saying that when you buy a PC, part of the price is the Microsoft Tax, to pay for a copy of Windows whether you want it or not.
May 1, 2015