Older articles (10/27)

1. Luminous clouds

   My balcony gets the evening sun. Sometimes the sun and clouds make for a stunning view. See below.

2. A simple feed reader for Youtube

   As an exercise, I wrote a small script to read the Atom feeds for some favourite youtube channels. Of course I could have installed a “real” feed-reader, but that would be overkill and not half as much fun. :-)

3. Switching vim to use native package management

   This documents how I switched to vim’s new native package management.

4. Formatting a USB stick on FreeBSD

   This documents how to format a USB-stick on a recent FreeBSD system

5. Attempting a conky replacement in Python (part 2)

   In part 1 we say that a simple replacement for conky for generating a statusline for i3 can be achieved. But since it uses the subprocess module to call external programs it is pretty CPU intensive.

   The question now is if we can reduce that? For that we’re going to use mmap to look at the mailbox, and call sysctlbyname(3) using ctypes to get the remaining system information. Note that sysctl et al and the names used are specific to FreeBSD.

6. Attempting a conky replacement in Python (part 1)

   My window manager (i3) has a small bar on the bottom of the screen. I use conky to put a single line of (text) information there.

7. Setting the Razer ornata chroma color from userspace

   This documents how to set the (static) color on this keyboard from user space using libusb (built into FreeBSD) and pyusb.

8. Automating package updates on FreeBSD

   When updating my ports, I prefer to use packages when I have not changed the options of a port. This describes how I do that.

9. Nikon D70s tips and tricks

   Some tips on how I use my D70s

10. Adding text or graphics to a PDF file (again)

    In an earlier article I talked about using a picture environment in LaTeX to add lines and text over an image. In another article I showed how to draw with PostScript, including using Encapsulated PostScript to include arbitrary images.

    In this article I want to cover the pros and cons of these methods and introduce a third method: TikZ.