Older articles (14/26)

1. Finding your own files, fast

   Inspired by this blog post by Julia Evans, I set up a quick way to find files in my home directory. This howto is based on FreeBSD, but should work (with some tweaking maybe) on Linux and OS-X as well.

2. Adding scale markers to a scanned image

   in a previous article we saw how a desktop scanner can be used for macro photography. Often it would be handy to include a visual reference of the scale of such pictures. In this howto I’m using asymptote to add accurate scales next to the picture.

3. Using a scanner for macro photography

   Although you wouldn’t guess it from the contents of this blog, my day job involves the design and production of products from fiber reinforced composites. A lot of my projects fall under non-disclosure agreements, so I cannot discuss them here.

   What I can do is share some of the methods I’ve developed over the years. One of those is using a desktop scanner to make close-ups.

4. Extracting data from XML with regular expressions

   While regular expressions can’t fully parse XML, they can be sufficient to extract data from it. In cases where the dataset is large and we are only interested in a small part of the data, this can be significantly faster than using a full XML parser.

5. Updating Python to 3.5

   This article documents the process I followed to update Python 3.4 to 3.5 on my FreeBSD machines.

6. Python bindings for libmagic

   This documents how I installed Python bindings for libmagic.

   There are actually different bindings for libmagic. One set is part of the original distribution. It can be found in /usr/src/contrib/file/python/. But in my opinion it is somewhat cumbersome to use and not very Pythonic.

   The implementation from ahupp/python-magic in Github feels more natural.

7. Design for manufacture

   Manufacturing is more of a craft than it is science.

   After having seen it linked on Hacker News, I’ve been following Spencer Wright‘s adventures in additive manufacturing (more specifically powder bed fusion in titanium);

   • bin of broken dreams
   • learning from success

8. Windows 8: the infinite yak-shaving

   So I got a call from a friend who’s ms-windows 8 laptop was wedged.

   Having set the machine up for him, I felt obliged to help, even though troubleshooting ms-windows ranks pretty on the bottom my list of favorite activities.

9. Using a Sony PRS-T2N e-reader with FreeBSD

   This article describes how to mount and transfer files to a Sony PRS-T2N.

10. Checking links with linklint

    This website contains lots of external links. A fact of life is that hyperlinks are subject to change, so they need checking every now and then.

    In this how-to article I’ll cover how I did that for this website.