Tips and thoughts on preparing and giving engaging presentations. As a person who does not give presentations often (lots of reasons), the points and pointers in this article sound really helpful. Also, one of the better explanations about why a full, information dense slide is unhelpful: Now imagine the audience …

When I made a remark that my commenting system is working again, a reader asked a simple enough question: how does one build a site like this? I realised there is no simple answer to this. Well, there is, but it takes a bunch of knowledge (and skills) one has …

Commenting had been broken since the 19th of December because of the host having upgraded to Python 3.9 and isso breaking. I tried installing it anew from pip, but there is still a really old version on there; installing it as egg directly from its Git repository1 kind …

If you are even remotely using the same workflows as me, you will be using vim quite a bunch, and not limited to one machine with a given operating system. You might also have taken a liking to YouCompleteMe to serve as the code/word completion solution of choice. The …

Recently we got a DVD. After turning it around in our hands a few times and giggling at our reflections, we ordered an external USB DVD/CD eater so we actually could ingest some of its contents. As the hip techy people we are, having this material available to us …

Use web feeds to subscribe to websites and get the latest content in one place. Feeds put you in control. It’s like subscribing to a podcast, or following a company on Facebook. You don’t need to pay or hand over your email address. You get the latest content …

Lately, I was thinking back to the time when I had my 15" CRT monitor (and later my whopping 19" flat CRT) tuned to the beats that Winamp was playing for me. It was a famous plugin called Milkdrop, and it provided nicely psychedelic looking visuals based on the audio …

Draft digging time! Something I've had in my drafts since the 25th of October, 2014, apparently: Roundcube is a decent self-hosted webmail solution, which benefits from integrating Google Contacts so you do not have to duplicate your address books (assuming you use Google for yours). Luckily someone wrote a plugin …

An update about what I do with vim, making it more powerful and taking away some of the envy I have for the excellent IDE's out there (for example PyCharm and the rest of the IntelliJ family by JetBrains - try it, it's awesome). Also, it makes vim look a lot …

Ever needed to unzip a bunch of zip files into their own directory and you don't want to do so one by one? No? Well, here I have a oneliner for you anyway: ls -1 *.zip | while read zf; do echo ${zf::-4}; unzip "$zf" -d "${zf::-4}"; done This …

I like taking pictures, and having some of the nicer ones as a background to my daily computer shenanigans is a nice extension of this. Lately, I've been playing around a bit with having pictures show up differently (more abstractly, with less details so they distract less, like those nice …

Editing and even viewing (raw) photographs can be a bit taxing on your CPU. If you have an Nvidia GPU, you can supercharge your photo editor by using its OpenCL extensions to offload operations to. Using darktable myself, I had to do a minor bit of research before it worked …

So you have this (web) application and you are growing a bit tired of having to manually bump the version number it tells to its users. Also, you would like to see if you are using an up-to-date edition of said app. Enter your Git repository. When you are running …

I very recently moved this weblog to a new host, and in the process finally changed from Apache running mod_wsgi to nginx with uWSGI and supervisor (well, at least for the Python based web apps, as dammIT is a flat site). I'm using isso as commenting system, which runs as …

In my ~/.ssh/config file, I have been using a socket file for every host that I connect to, so TCP sessions can be re-used for faster connecting to a host I already am connected to. I had several iterations of the exact filename for this, as with longer hostnames …

Andromeda is a way to theme an Android device with Substratum without needing root. You need adb though, so a desktop or laptop computer is needed to initiate the connection between the Andromeda app and Substratum. On regular machines this is not much of an issue, but Chromebooks are both …

A while ago I wrote about getting notified on battery low. It is quite useful when you leave your laptop unattended for a while, to get a notification on your phone and/or smartwatch when that laptop is about to run out of juice. It has saved me a few …

Edit at 2017-01-21: see the comments about better ways, especially comment 6. Secure Settings (Google Play) is a really helpful app to help Tasker (Google Play) do things automatically on your Android device. However, it has not been updated for quite a while (January 2015 at the time of this …

You might be in that same situation as I was until recently: you open up your ssh config file and start scrolling through the long list of nicely aliased private machines, that organically grown list of work - project A and the comment-section-divided work - project B, work - misc, work - are these …

If you don't know Tasker go and check it out now. It's by far the greatest way to automate, well, about everything on your Android device and its surroundings. However, one thing it is not, is really easy to start with. If you tap through the interface for the first …