Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “How-to”
Adventures with Applescript, AWK and Things
Cortesía de Shanidar
Puedes leer la versión inglesa de este post aquí: Learn to remember everything: the memory palace method
En este post os voy a enseñar cómo recordar a la perfección una lista. No importa la longitud de la lista: puede ser tu lista de la compra de 10 artículos, o una lista con 50, 100 o incluso 1000 cosas. Y en un próximo post, cómo aplicar este método para aprender idiomas.
Caveat: some of the links appearing in this post are affiliate links to Amazon.com If you buy anything from them, I get a small commission. As always, I only link to stuff I like. If you want to support (ever so slightly) this blog, buy something. If you don’t want, don’t do it ;)
Lately I’ve been watching an interesting TV series. Sherlock, the modern version of Conan Doyle’s stories and novels.
Picture courtesy of Shanidar
Do you want to have very good memory? I do, in fact I’ve been interested in it since my school days. There are some techniques that exploit your brain’s natural power, and the one I’m covering here is the memory palace technique.
I have already written about the memory palace memorisation technique (go and read the previous post if you don’t know what I’m talking about), but I did not cover a very important point there: Where can you find memory palaces to use in your memorisation?
An image can help your memory…
For how long?
This is a method I use to complement the memory palace technique to remember facts, either historical, about people or any other subject. It is pretty simple and follows the same principles as the memory palace: you need to make up bizarre images. To memorise facts we just need to attach keys to each fact, and link them to the subject or person we are considering.
Picture courtesy of Shanidar
You can also browse the best books I have seen on memory techniques and related areas here.
In this post I’ll teach you how to have perfect recall of lists of items. Length is not much of an issue, it can be your shopping list if 10 items or it can be a list with 50, 100 or even 1000. And in a forthcoming post I’ll show you how you how to apply this technique to learning new languages.
Below you can find a commented version of the LaTeX template I used to create two free ebooks and A6 booklets. Now you can tweak it as much as you like it!
The syntax highlighted TeX code comes from the htmlize package in emacs, to keep with my emacs 30 Day Challenge.
\\documentclass\[9pt,openany,final\]{memoir} % Set the font size with 9pt. Openany states that a chapter may start % in either page (recto or verso in publishing language).
It’s been already a week since I started my emacs 30 day challenge, and it is time for an update on how it is going and what packages I am using. I’ll start giving configuration updates along the way, I’m still fiddling with them. You can check also my post about using gnus to read mail with Gmail.
Browsing with Conkeror The same day I started my 30 day challenge, the emacs focused blog emacs-fu posted a wonderful article highlighting the conkeror web browser (not to be confused with Konqueror, the standard browser in KDE based desktops).
Last Tuesday I made the move. I ditched Ubuntu and installed Arch Linux in my Acer Aspire One. After my post Linux is a time killer (which attracted a lot of attention, and didn’t really carry the message I wanted) I got a lot of comments to think about. The two most suggested Linux distributions were Debian/unstable and Arch Linux. Well, maybe Arch Linux was not that talked about, but the following comment bought me out:
A few weeks ago I saw in my Google Analytics that someone came to this blog looking for “Origami iPhone case”. As I have a Origami CD case, and several posts on iPhone/iPod Touch games… it was a page hit. But I thought: if I can have a neat CD case, I can also design a neat origami case for an iPhone! Said and… done. It took a few tries (and a few days), as you can see below.
Yes, I know it: it is easy. But I will be doing a wipe and reinstall of my MacBook, and when I need to reinstall everything I want a place to check for the steps I did. I found almost all tips needed here.
The first step is checking for Mercurial (wikipedia) in your system. Open a terminal and type
hg version
If your terminal complains about command not found, you don’t have Mercurial installed.
Although this looks like a all-free / no taste cake, it is wonderful. And of course, at it is gluten, dairy and egg free, almost everyone can eat it. What you will need:
1 measure soy yogurt 1 measure dark brown sugar (we used Tate&Lyle Dark Brown Sugar) 1 measure gluten-free flour 1/4 measure oil 1 teaspoon baking powder Here measure depends on how much iogurt do you have.
With GIMP’s “Map to sphere”
A few years ago, while I was still mainly a Windows user, I read ‘Pragmatic programmer: From journeyman to master’, and learnt about Version Control Systems. You know, SVN, CVS, Git, Darcs. As I was just a single user working locally (just wanted the incremental and logged backups), I installed RCS. Almost the oldest, and in some sense the most simple. It can work locally, just with a file of delta (text added from one revision to the next) which is a plain text, human readable file.
After buying my iPod Touch and playing a little with it, I realised that battery life was a problem, with the WiFi always on. Thus, I was always bringing up Settins-WiFi and turning on and off. There was no easy and quick way to do it… Until I jailbroke it. I installed SBSettings, and its first use was that. Swipe the upper status bar, and the menu shown above appears.
The free iPod stand
Right: middle line, left top line
In this post I will explain how to recycle an old credit card to build a stand for your iPod touch / iPhone. You can choose from 3 designs, depending on your preferred inclination.
Here is what you will need:
A printed version of the shape. Scroll down for the jpg’d version A card Scissors Something to write A small file
CicleImatges()
Source code:
// Copyright 2009 Rubén Berenguel
// ruben /at/ maia /dot/ ub /dot/ es
// This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or
// modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
// published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of
// the License, or (at your option) any later version.
// This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
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.
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.
Have you ever wondered how to take a screenshot remotely, via the command line in a Linux system? Here is a way to do it. At the bottom you can also find a script to move it to the root of your personal page (if you have) to open the screenshot in your browser.
I have a Lisp program running inside Slime (The Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs) in an emacs instance running in my office computer.
There is a plain and easy way to download YouTube .flv videos (which you can watch with VLC Media Player, or in a Mac with Quicktime Player and additional plug-ins).
To do so, you need the Safari Web Browser (Mac or Windows). Go to your desired page hosting a Flash Video file, and select Activity in the Window menu. There you will find the files being downloaded in the web-page you are visiting… double click the bigger one (as usually flash videos are the biggest files in YouTube pages, if you can’t find such a big file, check for the .
My chair, my fractals (A4) and my Drazen
Petrovic poster (4xA4)
Rasterbator is an online poster maker, for you to print in your own printer. Of course, the results are not as good as full quality posters like these, but they look pretty good when looked from afar. It rasterises an image you upload (or link from anywhere in Internet), does some magic stuff, and the result is a bunch (you decide graphically how many, orientation and other options) of A4 (or Legal) sheets arranged in a nice PDF, which you have to print.
An English version of my diagrams for the origami flower-box Origami flower-box (Caja-Flor) diagrams, in English. Loosely based upon Kawasaki’s rose and a traditional japanese box. Click on the diagrams to get a bigger view of them. It appeared (Spanish version) on the Spanish Origami Association Bulletin, Second Volume, 2008. You can also take a look at my easy origami CD case.
It will look like this when finished, closed and opened.
A few years ago I was looking for an origami CD case. I found this site (which uses Tom Hull’s design). Although it is a quick and neat design for an origami case, I don’t like it, it feels like the CD is about to fall. So I tweaked for a while, and came up with this design. It takes a little longer to fold, but holds really firm, and looks nicer after.