Don’t look to Facebook to talk to your loved ones
October 4th should be a day ingrained in everyone’s memory as the day on which Facebook demonstrated its fallibility and undependability. As I write this post, DNS servers appear to load Facebook’s site, but an error message acts as a placeholder for anything else. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and other...
Thanks to Stack Exchange, I have my PDF solution
A helpful user on Stack Exchange solved the problem from my previous post for me by creating a small bash script, which reads values from a CSV file and then replaces the matching values in the PDF with the new ones. Check it out: This script takes an input...
Fixing PDF bookmark locations
It’s been a while since I’ve attempted to code anything. After hours of trying to figure it out, I finally found a somewhat-working solution. Unfortunately, it’s not a one-stop-shop solution. Let me explain. The issue So, a very efficient way to try to write things is using Pandoc, which...
Finding inspiration to write about Linguistics again
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m trying to write a book and I often find myself “hiding from it”, as my former advisor used to say. I really want to write this book and I have no doubt that I will be able to write all 200+ pages required of...
Using git as a version controller for books (Part 1)
What’s git? Version control? Huh? Okay. So, let’s say that you’re a software programmer. It’s your job to write the code for this huge program and you need: A way to keep backups A way to manage files A way to restore previous edits Let’s say you’re collaborating with...
I wrote this post minimally
You know, I’ve liked the idea of minimalism and minimalist blogs. I’d even contemplated using Luke Smith’s lb blogs package before to write a blog. But, really, the “bloatiness” of WordPress works for me. I’m using another blog package bashblog to write this and it seems pretty painless. However,...
So long, Ubuntu 20.04. Hello, 18.04
Well, I had to finally throw in the towel. The unfortunate problem of the black screen after booting didn’t seem to go away. In fact, it seemed to be a fluke of the graphics card “co-operating,” when it did work. Otherwise, I lost all hardware acceleration and could only...
Challenges of installing Ubuntu 20.04 on my new work computer
Why get a work computer? I would first like to say that I believe separating work life from home life is a good thing. However, that has become a bit obfuscated, due to everyone having to work from home, essentially. I spend a lot of free time on the...
Removing watermarks from PDFs with pdftk!
The issue at hand Many PDFs that I download have watermarks on them. The watermarks being there isn’t always bothersome, but many of them either obstruct important text or they end up making me use more ink when I print. So, through my tinkering, I found a way to...
Well, it’s about time.
After several weeks of isolation and forced staying at home, I've finally got something done....