From flickr
Around a year ago, I stumbled into this lifehacker page, suggesting an IBM-developerWorks tutorial on how to install a just 3 things to your system to be able to… whistle control your computer. Whistle a tune, open Firefox. Things like these. You know how geeky I am, I had to try it. Smaller problem: the tutorial is for Linux/Windows and I was on a Mac. Bigger problem: it is slightly outdated and short on some details.
Althouh I use AucTeX, which already has nice quick-writing techniques, I have found emacs' abbrev-mode together with skeletons are a nice addition to it, allowing me to be really quick at writing LaTeX. The included examples to use dabbrev and skeletons are for the mathbb and theorem environments.
Sample usage: When I write \mbb, and then open the left {, mbb gets expanded to mathbb… so I have \mathbb{ as needed.
When you are about to send a file to ArXiV, it greets you with the following confirmation message, just before the “Click here”:
Now Processing Submission
Read carefully the information below, recite aloud the English alphabet backwards starting from Z, breathe deeply, read carefully the information below once again, and then with a suitable pause (at least 10 seconds) you should
CLICK HERE TO CHECK STATUS
It made me lough quite a bit a few months ago :)
Last year our department got a nice and shiny Xerox WorkCentre, with scan+mail capabilities. Wonders of technology, now I can scan those chapters I use from books that weigth tons. But… of course, the machine scans two pages each time, and thus creates a double bound PDF.
And this doesn’t work well with my way to print booklets, so a working solution was to use ghostscript and ImageMagick from the command line.
My month, starting
For the last two years, I have been really happy, living without a definite calendar. I just knew I had a meeting with my boss “next Monday”, or had a workshop somewhere “in the last weeks of January”. But these days I’ve come to realize I just need a calendar now… And finally managed to mix org-mode's events with standard emacs calendar+diary views. This calendar is emacs calendar’s mode standard one (I love its looks) but harvests information from org-mode’s headlines and timestamps.
For a while I have been either not LaTeXing a lot, or not using AucTeX frequently. Strange indeed! But in July, while in Göttingen I wrote part of some lecture notes of one of the courses. And again, used auctex-preview in emacs to find errors in what I was writing.
I can’t even tell how wonderful it is, to share the source with the images with the formulas. An image is worth more than a googol words.