Computer Notes

Here are some of the miscellaneous notes I’ve made while using computers as an academic. University of Edinburgh users might find more things on my internal page; Toronto DCS users could check my old internal page.

University of Edinburgh

• Euclid notes, how to fix: course catalogue links, and the browser looping problem.

Unix / command-line

• Setting your login shell.
• Passwordless SSH. Stops you from having to type in your passwords while maintaining reasonable security.
• Other SSH notes.

Web browsing

• The start page I have in my browser.
• My Firefox extensions: Redirectify, DRPS arrows.
• Firefox extensions I like: uBlock Origin, NoScript, Greasemonkey (my user scripts).
• Mastodon bookmarklets.

Documents and graphics

• LaTeX notes.
• Colored word-based diff — great for tracking changes in LaTeX documents held in version control (see below).
• MetaPost is a programming language based on Knuth’s MetaFont for producing beautiful postscript diagrams. TeX can provide typeset text for the diagrams. I’ve noted a couple of things for which I had to search.
• Making presentation slides.
• Making compact image files — lossy and lossless ways of making image files smaller.

Programming and scientific computing

• Notes on linking to libraries in non-standard locations with gcc/g++.
• Matlab/Octave efficiency notes.
• Some inconsistencies in Matlab/Octave.
• Tiny Octave/Matlab tricks page.
• Very small number of R and Octave translation notes.
• Version control is useful for projects with text source files (LaTeX, C++, Matlab or whatever). I have notes on subversion (svn) and cvs. I also used to use Bazaar (bzr), (now breezy, brz), but bzr didn’t win. Git seems to have basically won for now, so it’s what I use most.
• It’s good to have a decent monospace font for use in terminals and programming. (Although some people argue for using proportional fonts everywhere.) I use the Inconsolata font, which is free and decent. On recent linux distributions, copy Inconsolata.otf to your ~/.fonts and run fc-cache or maybe fc-cache -f -v so that applications can see it.

Obscure/obsolete stuff

• Getting OpenBUGS to work under linux (obsolete notes circa 2005/2008).
• Lagging, slow or stuttering Dell trackpad problems when on AC power.
• Notes on compiling GTK+ 2.x (circa 2006).
• A performance bug pasting between vim in a terminal and GTK apps.
• A new mail reporting problem in mutt and how to make it a bit better.