Welcome

This is my home in the virtual world, where I write about things that I want to share. The freely available software that I've written as well as some of the photographs I've taken over the years can also be found here. Please use the navigation links on the right if you are looking for something.

Recent articles

1. Managing configuration files with ‘deploy’

   The deploy script is a program for managing configuration files.

2. Opening files from the command line

   This Python script is a small helper to open files from the command line. It was inspired by a OS X utility of the same name.

3. Updating the site generator “pelican” to 3.5.0

   After updating the site generator that powers this website, I had to make some adjustments.

4. Updating FreeBSD from source

   Sometimes I need to update my FreeBSD operating system. I prefer to do that from the source code, so that my customizations in (/etc/src.conf) remain.

   At the writing of this article, I'm tracking the 10-STABLE branch. To start this, I removed the contents of /usr/src and ...

5. Switching IPython to Python 3

   More and more, IPython has become my tool of choice as the ultimate calculator and to try out concepts and code for use in my programs.

   While I generally use the terminal-based interactive shell, notebooks offer more capabilities for integrating text, formulas and graphics.

   With Python 2.7 effectively mostly ...

6. Making saline solution

   The standard recipe for saline solution is 9 grams of salt per liter of water.

   Since most people don't have an accurate scale, we need to convert the nine grams to a volume. For that we need the bulk density of table salt. For fine table salt, the listed ...

7. Modifying a FreeBSD port

   Installing software on FreeBSD is made easier by the ports system; a collection of Makefiles and patches that contains instructions on how to build programs and libraries. E.g. building and installing the mpv media player is done in the following way:

   # cd /usr/ports/multimedia/mpv
   # make install clean ...

8. TeXcalc

   As an engineer, I often do diverse calculations that I want to save in my logbooks which I write in LaTeX. Up to now I've either formatted those by hand or used the listings package to include calculations made in IPython.

9. Stltools

   From the release of version 3.2, the py-stl software has been renamed to stltools. The reason I made this change mostly has to do with how FreeBSD handles packages. Programs that require an interpreter are prefixed with its name and version. So py-stl would become py27-py-stl, which would be ...

10. Generate random passwords

    One way of making hard to guess passwords is to take random data and encode it with base64 to make it readable. This is what I've done in the genpw.py script.

    This is mainly useful for passwords that you can store in a secure manner (like in an ...