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Hack: Simply Scheme as a single pdf with wget and pdftk
There’s an introductory Scheme programming book called Simply Scheme that is available online for free. I wanted to brush up on my Scheme recently as part of writing my own implementation of the language in Haskell. However, the book is only available as html or as pdfs of the chapters. Whi …
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Typing the λ (lambda) character with the compose key on Xorg
I am working my way through a book called Types and Programming Languages, by Benjamin C. Pierce at the moment. I’ve just started the chapter on lambda calculus and I thought it would be fun to be able to include the λ character in my notes. I realize that this sounds a little like displac …
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Rooting the Coby Kyros MID9742 Android tablet
I recently got hold of a tablet, mostly for reading PDFs on, but I realized that the preinstalled android OS didn’t let me have root access. Which is deeply immoral. I ought to be able to do what I want to the devices I buy. It took me ages to work out how to get root on it, so I have writen …
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Split multi-page PDFs into single page PDFs on GNU/Linux with pdftk
Is there a nice way to split a multi-page PDF into its constituent pages? Its a question that comes up more often than you would think. Of course you could point some proprietary software at it, or you could do the job by hand. But there is a lovely free software way to do it, so you would be sor …
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Motherboard details from the GNU/Linux commandline
A quick bit of commandline-fu today. And a trick that I always spend ages having to search the web for. Its often the case that you want to find the exact serial number or model or chipset of your motherboard. There is a wonderful command called dmidecode which fetches the DMI data from your mach …
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Copying videos off Vimeo with bash
A lot of video people are hosting on Vimeo these days, it seems well featured reliable and fast, and it doen’t have quite the same psychotically disordered commenting culture as has developed at youtube. However, though there is good stuff to watch on there, not every video uploaded has …
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New Features On Site: Page Archive, Tags In an Atom Feed
I’ve been doing a bit of hacking on the frontend of the site today, and I’ve added a couple of new features one of which I’ve wanted for a while and one of which I needed in order to get stuff aggregated into the Planet Perl Iron Man blogging challenge. Well, for the Pl …
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Tip: Make a distressed font with GIMP
The other day I had need to make a sort of distressed/grungy/textured looking font using The GIMP. You know the kind of thing. A little googling bought up Grunge texture text from gimp.pixtuts.com, which got me most of the way towards the effect I wanted. This video is my simplified version of t …
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Tip: Selective Focus Effect with GIMP
Selective focus tilt/shift photographs can create an amazing toytown feel to them. I’ve used a lensbaby composer to similar effect, for example in my photo set Toytown, but the true master of the art in my opinion is Olivio Barbieri, whose work is truly stonking. Well, the thing is th …
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Design and photography
This section will be a collection of tips and things that I have discovered about taking photos and about editing them later on. I am by no means some big shot photographist, so do feel free to correct my naivete in the comments. My photo gallery has (what I consider to be) some of my better pics …
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