This isn't a blog and the content here is not blog posts. Rather, these are random notes I've taken that I've chosen to make public for ease of reference. If you stumble across them and find them helpful, that's great, however, compelling reading and thoughtful prose are not to be found here.
It seems that I change my method of installing and managing multiple Python versions on macOS about every 9-12 months. This note describes my current method, which also happens to be the simplest that I've used.
I recently had the occasion to use ImageMagick (IM) to create a PNG image from Pango markup. Both IM and Pango had been installed via macports, yet IM complained that there was no decode delegate for this image format.
I finally decided to update a few sites to use Let's Encrypt (LE) for SSL certificates. These are my notes about using a nuts-and-bolts / low-level method of doing this that doesn't involve automation.
This note describes some simple software I've written called photos, which to collects the photos and videos I take and stores them in a repository for further organization and backup.
How to install nodejs and npm on OS-X.
I sat down recently to spend the afternoon making a customized cheatsheet for GNU Emacs. I ended up spending more time on this project than I'd like to admit, but I am pleased with the results. This note provides links to LaTeX source and PDF output
Because I've configured my GNU emacs to automatically run in daemon mode I wish to 'use' emacs by running emacsclient exclusively. But emacsclient isn't an OS-X 'app' which means that I can't double click on a file to open it with emacsclient. It also means that I can't use the 'Open With' menu to edit a file via emacsclient. Here is how to resolve those issues.
I have used the Emacs for Mac OS-X distribution of Gnu Emacs for years and have been quite pleased with it. Emacs' server-mode is great in that it makes for very fast load times and it allows sharing buffer contents, kill rings, etc., between windows. However, I found it a little tricky to get it working perfectly on OS-X. These are my notes on how to install and configure it so that server-mode works correctly on OS-X.
Code snippet for colored syntax highlighting with pprint.
I have no idea what Apple has to make it so difficult to simply print a list of scheduled appointments from a calendar. Do some googling - you'll quickly figure out that a simple and acceptable way really doesn't exist. For example, if one simply does a Print->Scheduled Events for the next six months, Apple kindly prints an entry for every single day over the next six months, whether or not the day has an appointment. I don't want to print ten pages simply to get a list of the five appointments in the next six months that I have on a particular calendar.