18 posts tagged "writing"

I didn’t grow up in a family where literature played any significant role, other than entertainment, that is. My mother enjoyed reading novels by Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins. My mathematician grandmother read French paperbacks from the collection “J’ai Lu” by authors ranging from Agatha Christie to Guy des Cars.

Around two years ago I switched my writing AI helper of choice, going from Grammarly to LanguageTool, for many reasons.

Last Monday I published the 60th edition of De Programmatica Ipsum, also known as “DPI”, the “unusual magazine about programmers, code, and society, written by humans since 2018.” De Programmatica Ipsum has been published continuously every first Monday of each month since October 2018.

Hugo is fantastic but it misses one key functionality: the generation of PDF files. This article provides a possible solution for it using Podman, Pandoc, and a custom tool built in Rust.

As I explained last week I have been updating this website in various ways; I removed the downloadable PDFs, then added privacy-friendly analytics, and finally, I set up a scheduled pipeline in GitLab to automatically build and deploy this website every Friday morning.

Last week I was celebrating the 20 years of my Harman Kardon SoundSticks, but last Monday there was another anniversary that some of us celebrated fondly: EditPlus 1.0, released March 20th, 1998, is 25 years old!

I’ve been migrating old blog posts (2004-2014) to this blog lately, and you can find them by clicking the “Next” button at the bottom of the index.

There has been a particular text editor that defined each period of my career as a software developer.

Writing a programming book is not very complicated, to be honest: it just consists of putting one word after another.

Note taking is very important to me. I keep everything in my notes, from ideas for blog posts like this one, to code snippets, to web pages, to plans of never started businesses, and so much more.

Looking inside some old archives I came across my first attempt at a book.

Probably the single most important skill that has always helped me when dealing with computers is the ability to type without looking at the keyboard.

Here’s a list of iPad styluses I’ve owned in the past few years:

Markdown is my new favorite tool. It all started while looking for alternatives to LaTeX to write documents and booklets, because since the release of the iPad last year, I wanted to publish in PDF and in EPUB format at the same time, and LaTeX does not offer that option off the box.

I just stumbled into this amazing TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert via James Duncan Davidson (@duncan in Twitter) and I want to share it with you with some very personal thoughts below.

I am a big LaTeX fan, mostly thanks to my friend Cedric who introduced me to it ;) And I don’t regret it at all; there is simply no better way to create long, beautiful PDF documents, particularly during these times of dissertation writing!

Well, you’re pretty much on your own for that :)

So here we go again. They say that the only constant thing is change.