Older articles (6/27)

1. Simple viewer for STEP files on UNIX

   The STEP format is probably the most used accurate 3D geometry exchange format. (It can contain a lot more than just geometry!)

   STL files (most often used in 3D printers) are based on triangles, which are basically only an approximation of the real geometry.

   A lot of available STEP-file viewer are windows-only. I’ve been looking for a simple STEP-file viewer for UNIX-like operating systems, so that I can see the parts that I’m making using cadquery (see also: cadquery documentation).

   I’m not a fan of IDE’s like cq-editor or IDE’s in general. In particular, cq-editor pulls in the whole of spyder (a Python IDE) just to get syntax highlighting in its built-in editor.

2. De-facebook your internet

   Since I do not enjoy being a product for facebook to monetize, I’ve decided to de-facebook the internet, at least for me.

   This article assumes you’re running your own DNS server. The code in this article can generate configuration data for dnsmasq and unbound.

   The consumer versions os ms-windows don’t come with a DNS server, and most of the good ones do not run on it. If you are using ms-windows, I suggest using a pi-hole <https://pi-hole.net/> on your home network as a DNS server.

3. Installing Openstreetmap data on a Garmin zūmo 340LM

   This documents how you can install openstreetmap data on the Garmin zūmo 340 LM. This procedure probably also works on other Garmin devices, but I haven’t tested that. The commands listed in this article assumes you’re using a UNIX-like operating system. While most of the actions could be performed on ms-windows, I haven’t run that in decades, so I’m not the person to give advice about that

4. Commuting on a zero DSR

   At the end of 2020 I purchased a Zero DSR to use as my main transport for commuting. These are my experiences after approximately the first year.

5. Using a USB headset on FreeBSD

   At work I’ve been using several different USB headsets. Let’s see if they work on FreeBSD.

6. Add TeX macro around (visual) selections in Vim

   With simple mappings, we can add a TeX command around visually selected text or around the current word in vim.

7. Does repeated JPEG conversion reduce quality?

   Recently, in a comment on freethoughtblogs.com, it was posited that repeated rewriting of a JPEG file causes quality loss.

8. Why can’t a piece of software be finished?

   It is rare to see a piece of software considered “done”. The TeX typesetting engine in one of the few examples I could name. Why isn’t this more common?

9. Decoding temperature data logger files

   At work, we recently bought an EBI 40 TC-01 6-channel temperature logger. It saves data in a file with the ed3 extension. It comes with a ms-windows program to show the data and export to CSV and ms-excel.

   However, I want to be able to use the data on my FreeBSD workstation. So I have to figure out the data format of the ed3 files.

10. Building an epub from a single ReStructuredText file

    The sphinx documentation generator is a an excellent tool. It was written to generate documentation for Python, but is used by many other projects as well. Its source format is ReStructuredText.

    These webpages are written in ReStructuredText as well, and I also use this format for other bits and pieces. On occasion, I want to convert a single ReStructuredText file to an epub. This article documents how to do that.