Older articles (8/27)

1. Opening vim in a new terminal

   By default, when you open vim it runs on the current terminal. When running X11, I want to start it in a new terminal.

2. Buildworld benchmark on my new workstation

   As a real-world benchmark I rebuilt the FreeBSD OS after the most recent published vulnerabilities.

3. Writing speed on FreeBSD 12.1-STABLE amd64

   This is a repeat of the tests I ran in 2010 and 2012, on my current hardware.

   The test is …

4. Playing a sound when the battery is low

   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.

5. Xinput settings for Kensington Expert Mouse

   Detecting possible parameters.

   > xinput --list-props 13
   Device 'Kensington Kensington Expert Mouse':
       Device Enabled (138):  1
       Coordinate Transformation Matrix (139):        1 …

6. Xinput settings for Synaptics TouchPad

   Detecting possible parameters. Updated for “styx”, a Lenovo ideapad 5

   styx:~> xinput --list-props 11
   Device 'MSFT0001:00 04F3:3140 TouchPad …

7. Cleaning up old port configurations

   On FreeBSD, ports save their configuration parameters under /var/db/ports. When you de-install a port, this configuration remains behind. This is how to clean old configurations up.

8. Opencascade problem

9. Generating barcodes with “BWIPP”

   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.

10. On the nature of GUI programs

    This is based on answers (1, 2) 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.