During my engineering education and the start of my career, a lot of design and drafting work was still done on paper. During that time I also discovered computers, and how they could be an extra tool in my toolbox.
Although my training and career has been in mechanical engineering, there is not much about that on these pages. In this new category, I hope to remedy that.
By default, when you open vim it runs on the current terminal. When running X11, I want to start it in a new terminal.
As a real-world benchmark I rebuilt the FreeBSD OS after the most recent published vulnerabilities.
Although I have a battery indicator on the bottom of my laptop screen I don’t alway check that often enough. That’s why I wanted to add an extra warning in the form of an audio signal. So even if I’m turned away from the laptop, it should still catch my attention.
Originally I looked for a Python module to generate barcodes, and I found the treepoem module. This used Pillow to create bitmaps, and I preferred to have PDF or other resolution independant formats. Looking through the README, I found that treepoem is a wrapper for bwipp. This is a set of PostScript procedures to generate barcodes.
Since I’m familiar with using PostScript, I decided to use bwipp directly.
This is based on an answer I gave on stackoverflow. That answer is specific
to the tkinter toolkit that comes with Python. The principles apply to
other GUI toolkits and languages as well but the terminology used (like
mainloop and idle task) may be different.
This article documents how I set up Python and the syslog daemon so that Python programs can log to syslogd.