How to Show Untagged Items in ZoteroI like having my Zotero library tidy and ordered, which means having proper tags for each item that I import, but I was missing an option to quickly list those items without tags.
ZoteroWriting articles for De Programmatica Ipsum made me adopt a workflow to read and annotate research papers. Most of the material that I use to write articles for DPI are papers, nearly all in PDF format, some with OCR’d text, some without (particularly older ones).
Open Source ForbiddenWhat I’m going to tell you today might seem incredible, but just the same way as LLMs are banned from many workplaces these days, or mobile apps were outlawed by many an IT department 15 years ago, I was consulting 20 years ago for a large firm (a very large Swiss firm, actually) in which… Open Source code was explicitly forbidden to ever be put into production.
CalibreI’ve already mentioned Calibre quite a few times in this blog in the past; for example when I talked about my sustainable ebook strategy, or when I gave some Flatpak tips and tricks. But Calibre has become such an important part of my workflow and daily computing habit, I feel I need to publish a product review about it.
Plugins for tmuxI’m a big fan of tmux since I started using it back in 2010. I can’t conceive working on a terminal window without it, and I also use it in remote systems I access via SSH.
Lister 2.0.0I’ve talked about my Rust project “lister” for the first time in this blog around 2 years ago, when I explained how to generate PDF files from individual Hugo entries. In the meantime I’ve enhanced it quite a bit, and this article provides some information about the latest version.
Share Your Terminal Live on the Web With ttydIf you’re in the business of giving demos or talking at conferences, webinars, or other gatherings, sooner or later you’ll have to show your terminal for a demo; in this case, this week’s article will surely interest you: ttyd.
The Proton SuiteFirst, a mandatory disclaimer: this is not a sponsored post (there are none in this blog, btw), just me telling the story of how I became a happy Proton user during the past 5 years; I’m not affiliated with them in any way.
Adopting WezTermI’ve recently discovered WezTerm, also known as “Wez’s Terminal Emulator” by Wez Furlong, and I’ve adopted it completely, becoming my default terminal application.
FOSS in Developing CountriesThe other day, I had friends in Bolivia asking me if they could install Windows on a laptop they got through an NGO that initially came bundled with Linux.
GiteaGitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab; they are not the only solutions available to share Git repos with your friends and colleagues. I’ve been playing with Gitea recently, and it’s a really cool alternative, written in Go. Here’s a quick way to test it.
Memories of Centralized SCMsIt might sound incredible to younger developers out there, but there was a time when Git did not exist. In retrospect, the fact that Git has reigned supreme in its category for over 15 years was previously unheard of. SCM systems came and went in a steady succession since the early 1980s.
Introducing the Teaching EditorWe are very happy to introduce our latest open source project: the Teaching Editor. This project provides an online editor that automatically reloads the contents of an iPhone-sized frame. It also provides students with a read-only mode, allowing them to follow in real time whatever code is written in the screen of the teacher, and they can also download the current state of the code at any moment.
Useful 3rd Party Extensions to CoreTextWrapperOur CoreTextWrapper project in Github is certainly popular! Many developers have told us that they find it easier to approach Core Text using it, providing an easy learning path, showing the key concepts with an easy-to-use example.
nib2objc Featured on The Changelognib2objc has been featured recently in The Changelog, a blog about open source projects:
More nib2objc funThere are many things that I wanted to do with nib2objc since day one, but of course sometimes you just don’t have the time to implement them all. But here go two new additions to the project, that will make nib2objc even simpler and more fun to use: a Mac application and a Mac OS X Service! The command line version is OK, but again, not everyone feels at home with command line tools.
nib2objc updatedI’ve just committed version 1.2 of nib2objc to Github with the following enhancements:
nib2objc featured in SoftpediaAs the title suggests: check out the official nib2objc page in Softpedia!
EasyTableView for iPhone PrototypingOur first blog post of 2010 presents a tool that we’ve been using internally and that might be useful for other people.
Kevin Smith iPhone ApplicationI’ve just been notified by the nice guys from DenVog that the Kevin Smith iPhone application includes code from my Asynchronous UITableView sample, posted earlier this year. The app also features the MGTwitterEngine from Matt Gemmell, too.
nib2objc(Somehow this project seems to me so simple, that I’m sure someone has done this before. Anyway). This is my feeble attempt to bring an answer to the eternal dichotomy between those arguing about the relative benefits of creating user interfaces via Interface Builder or via pure Objective-C code: let me introduce nib2objc.
That Nice Freedom of Modifying SoftwareOne of the best learning tools I have found in my career is to take someone else’s code, and to modify it slightly to see what happens, to play with it, and eventually to release that code in this blog, or send it to the original author, fixing it somehow or adding some feature:
GitIf you haven’t tried git, you should. Git is a “distributed version control” system, that is, similar to Subversion with the big difference that… you do not need a server. There are only clients, any of them, and you can pull and push changes to and from other repositories from your project colleagues. The git Wikipedia entry does a much better job than me to introduce the subject :)
ExtShould you ever have to work on a web application again, just don’t think about it twice; Ext is an amazing piece of free software, light-years away from anything you’ve seen before.
Why do I prefer OpenOffice, NeoOffice, or AbiWord?I use OpenOffice (for Windows and Linux), NeoOffice (on the Mac) and AbiWord (in the three OSs) more often than Microsoft Office, and I many people recently asked me why. My choice has to do with many reasons, that might or might not apply to you:
Chupate Esta Naranjael fundador de la “free software foundation”, el carismatico richard stallman, inventor de la licencia GPL, siempre usaba la expresion “free as in free speech, not as in free beer” cuando explicaba el concepto del open source. basicamente, lo que el dice es que “free software” no es “gratis” sino “libre”, pero los anglofonos usan la misma palabra “free” para ambos conceptos.
Curso Acelerado De Unix, Linea De Comandos, Y Manejo Basico Del Tema Del Software Open Source, Para Artistas Liberados De Ventanas Colgadas Inutilmentepreparate unos mates, imprimi este mail y sentate con tiempo delante de la compu.
BirthdayCard ProjectI have just created a project page for the BirthdayCard Project. This was an experimental project for me, to test the combination of several open-source and proprietary technologies such as
The Power of Open SourceI’m just giving the finishing touches to my wxWidgets + SQLite + CppUnit personal project, all written in standard C++, and compiling in Mac, Windows and Linux as well. And I had the opportunity to see how good is to be able to change the source code of a library when you need it.
Avoiding Basic TroubleI remember that, late 2004, I was asked by my employer to evaluate the migration of a huge (huge, did I say huge?) Visual Basic 6 “classic” client-server application to an SOA-based Visual Basic .NET one. The application was a business-critical one for several customers, kind of a government ERP system, built initially in VB 3 or 4, and slowly migrated through the years to new versions of VB. Until VB.NET came out.
About Operating Systems and Networks“The true operating system is the net itself”. This phrase, common marketing argument in the late nineties, made me remind that in the eighties, Sun Microsystems’ founder, Scott McNealy, used the slogan “The Network is the Computer” to describe his vision.
New tools for open source developers - and others as wellThe business of software is getting more and more complicated. In your path from coder to developer you might find the need to see if someone out there has already coded what you need, hopefully in an open source project with the right kind of licence for you to be able to reuse it. And, at the same time, with the deep confidence that you are not breaking any copyright…