.::ich-wars-nicht.ch::.

I just received a pretty dang awesome confirmation-email for a CD order at CD Baby, a great indie music onlineshop/label:

Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, February 25, 2011.
We hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. In commemoration, we have placed your picture on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Sigh…
We miss you already. We’ll be right here at http://cdbaby.com/, patiently awaiting your return.

Awesome – makes me want to submit another order

Today I created a simple LaTeX Makefile based on this tutorial. First of all, this is the first time I’m writing a Makefile, but it seems to work; if I have overlooked anything just point it out to me.

# Makefile to create PDF documents from LaTeX-Files
# Needed software packages: pdflatex, rubber
# License: No copyright, just do what the heck you want with it
 
all: pdf clean
 
pdf:
	for file in $$(ls *tex | cut -d \. -f 1) ; do make $$file.pdf ; done
 
%.pdf: %.tex
	rubber -m pdftex $<
 
clean:
	rm -f *.toc *.aux *.log
 
cleanall:
	rm -f *.toc *.pdf *.aux *.log
 
.PHONY: all pdf clean cleanall
.SILENT: pdf
 
# vim: set tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 noexpandtab:

This creates a PDF version of each *.tex-File in the current directory using rubber. I chose rubber over directly using pdflatex because it compiles the documents as many times as necessary in order to get all the TOCs and footnotes. Feel free to substitute it with whatever other command you prefer.

Save the code in a file called Makefile and run make to get all *.tex-files in the current directory converted to PDF. Type make file.pdf to convert file.tex to file.pdf. Type make clean to remove all unnecessary *.toc, *.aux and *.log files and make cleanall to remove all PDF documents as well.

Warnings:

1. Don’t use make cleanall if you have other important PDF files in the current directory, they will get removed as well.
2. Retain the tabs in the Makefile, spaces won’t work

Heute erst entdeckt: Der Bloggerfilm.

Michael Eugster hat im Rahmen seiner Maturaarbeit eine kurze Dokumentation über die Schweizer “Bloggerszene” (aka Blogosphere) produziert. Cool gemacht, zeigt auch einige Bekannte Gesichter

Im Film wurde auch die “Abwanderung von Beiträgen zu Twitter / Facebook” erwähnt. Bei mir merkt man das auch stark. Ich wollte es genauer wissen und hab mir mal mit Protovis eine Statistik erstellt. Die Statistik zeigt die Anzahl Blogeinträge pro Monat. Schön zu sehen ist hier, wie die Zahlen nach meinem ersten Tweet stark gesunken sind.

Trotzdem bleiben die Zahlen einigermassen konstant. In der prä-Twitterischen Ära waren es zwischen 15 und 25 Posts pro Monat, jetzt in der Ritter… ääh, Twitterzeit sind es ungefähr 5 bis 10. Diese sind in meinem Fall meistens technischer Natur und häufig auf Englisch, um sie einem breiteren Publikum zugänglich zu machen, jedoch sind es ab und zu auch Dinge die ich im Internet finde und noch etwas ausführlicher kommentieren will, als es auf Twitter und Facebook möglich ist.

Für das schnelle Teilen von Links und Videos, wie es die Blogger früher viel gemacht haben, hat mein Blog allerdings ausgedient – Twitter ist da viel flexibler und schneller.

Fazit: Die Bloggerszene ist tot, es lebe die Bloggerszene!

I recently found a great documentary on Vimeo about the Arduino project. Highly recommended to watch, especially if you’re interested in electronics, programming, microcontrollers and hacking stuff.

This how-to will enable you to print and scan with a Brother DCP-7010 printer under Arch Linux. (For deb- and rpm-based Distributions, there are Drivers available.)

1. Install brother-dcp7010 and brscan2 via AUR
2. Install sane and a frontend for it, e.g. xsane
3. Add your user to the scanner-Group: gpasswd -a username scanner
4. Add the keyword brother2 to /etc/sane.d/dll.conf
5. Log out and back in

You should now be able to print and scan.

To update a file type (or rather a mime type) association under Linux, you can use the xdg-mime command.

$ xdg-mime default desktop-file mimetype

E.g. to open pdf files with evince, issue

$ xdg-mime default evince.desktop application/pdf