A Beautiful Place

Thunderbird line breaking behaviour

Thomas Strathmann — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 13:22:57 +0000

Because I keep forgetting which options to set to force Thunderbird to send and display line breaks instead of flowed plain text emails that may or may not come out right at the other end (usually those emails exhibit unsightly long lines which among other things might make quoting from some MUAs a PITA), here’s a reminder mostly to myself.

Set

mailnews.display.disable_format_flowed_support to true and
mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed to false.

For more details see http://arapulido.com/2009/12/01/enabling-line-wrapping-in-thunderbird.

IMAP Push with Dovecot and K-9 Mail on Android

Thomas Strathmann — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 15:12:32 +0000

Having had the unfortunate experience that K-9 Mail on Android set to polling mail every 10 minutes almost caused my telephone to burn a hole in my jeans pocket I investigated the IMAP push functionality. Luckily there’s already an informative article by a fellow faced with nearly the same problem that describes how to set up a sane configuration for IMAP push using Dovecot 2. That’s all good and well, but I was still running Dovecot 1.2 on my Debian stable system. Consequently I needed to upgrade to Dovecot 2 to make the best of the situation. Luckily, this did not prove to be too big of a problem. Just add the apropriate URL from http://wiki.dovecot.org/PrebuiltBinaries to your /etc/apt/sources.list and do what the error messages and/or warnings upon restarting the newly installed Dovecot imapd tell you (i.e., create a fresh config file that’s in line with the new options and defaults of Dovecot 2.0). So far everything works well, keeping my fingers crossed.

Snippets for LaTeX + Emacs users

Thomas Strathmann — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:58:41 +0000

I’ve been using Emacs to edit LaTeX for some time now, mostly resorting to AUCTeX’s keyboard commands to insert fonts, environments and some other stuff that I need in some documents. But I’m also a big fan of yasnippet, the de facto standard for inserting more or less complex templates and, well, snippets of text into an Emacs buffer. Just now I discovered that some people have already started quite a nice collection of templates ranging from fonts to matrices to whole document skeletons for LaTeX over at github. If you are not a user of AUCTeX yet and find keyboard commands hard to deal with, perhaps this could make your day. And if you are not already using Emacs, the only true text editor for complex editing duties (for quick edits, config files, editing on remote computers, etc. I still use vim religiously), then here’s another reason to switch.

BTW, the yasnippet documentation is very enlightening. For instance, I did not know that you can use the power of ELisp in your snippets to do quite amazing things automatically.

Some resources on functional programming, types, logic, etc.

Thomas Strathmann — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:28:43 +0000

If you’ve got some time to kill I’d suggest heading over to Edsko de Vries’ presentations page where he’s collected a few slides and some notes on topics ranging from linear and separation logic to proof theoretical basics and category theory useful for functional programmers. Chances are that there will not be very much new knowledge here depending on your background but I found some of it enjoyable and useful in case I want to look something up but cannot be bothered to grab a book from the shelf and find what I am looking for myself.

VST plugins on Mac OS X

Thomas Strathmann — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 16:04:15 +0000

There’s actually a free (as in beer) software for Mac OS X that hosts VST plugins compiled for Windows (it uses WINE under the hood). It is the editor software for the V-Machine, a rack unit that can host VST plugins. You can download it from the manufacturer’s website. MIDI input works out of the box, but there is no way to configure the audio output, so you have to use Mac OS’s own “Audio MIDI Setup” application to select the default destination. By using SoundFlower you can effictively integrate VFX and thus the Windows VST plugins into the DAW of your choice. All without a Windows installation and without paying any extra money. Enjoy the free VST plugins out there. I know I will.

MacBook Pro graphics card switching tool

Thomas Strathmann — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:43:40 +0000

After a good two months of being annoyed by a burning hot MacBook Pro with short battery life, I discovered gfxCardStatus, a menu bar application that lets you choose between the integrated and discrete graphics card manually or based on whether a power adapter is plugged in. It’s free and very useful. Nicely done!

Alfred program launcher for Mac OS X

Thomas Strathmann — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 11:14:14 +0000

Just discovered Alfred, a free program launcher for Mac OS X (including 10.7 aka Lion), that works really well as a replacement for Quicksilver. Cool feature: Includes a calculator mode (but of course it’s not nearly as nice and feature … Continue reading →

Time Machine Backup on GNU/Linux

Thomas Strathmann — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 10:50:05 +0000

Time Machine for Mac OS is actually a nice backup tool that I use religiously (and that saved my data at least once from total annihilation) since it came out. But what I did not know is that you could pretty easily use a GNU/Linux based file server to hold your backups instead of plain old hard disks or Apples proprietary hardware solutions. Unfortunately though some of the descriptions of setting up such a system you find readily on the web are outdated, so I’ll try to provide a short write-up of the necessary steps (mostly for my own convenience).

First, you’ll want to set up a GNU/Linux machine for the purpose if you don’t already have once. I went with the recent Debian Squeeze 32-bit distro and a software RAID-1 with two identical SATA hard drives.
Then, install the netatalk package. It provides an AFP server that is recognized by the Time Machine software as a valid destination for storing backups. If like me you have at least one Mac that runs Lion, you’ll have to install the latest netatalk version 2.2beta or higher. I reproduce the description of how to achieve this painlessly on Debian from this thread:
- add
```
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian unstable main
```
  to your /etc/apt/sources.list.
- add
```
Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 200
```
  to a new file in /etc/apt/preferences.d
- update and install netatalk from Debian unstable:
```
apt-get update
apt-get -t unstable install netatalk
```
- Now, we have to configure netatalk so that a Mac’s Time Machine application will have an AFP share that it can use for backing up your computer.
  1. First, I’d suggest you create a directory called TimeMachine or something similar that will be shared by netatalk as a backup volume.
  2. Uncomment the last line in the /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf file. You should have as the only non-comment line
```
- -tcp -noddp -uamlist uams_dhx.so,uams_dhx2.so -nosavepassword
```
  3. Finally we can add the share to /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default by
    simply adding a line like
```
/home/foo/TimeMachine TimeMachine allow:foo options:tm
```
    where foo is your user name. This config creates a share called TimeMachine that is usable as Time Machine backup volume (option tm) and can only be accessed by the user foo.
- In Mac OS you can now mount the AFP share from your newly set up file server and select the mounted volume as backup disk in Time Machine preferences. Before backing up Time Machine will create a sparse bundle with the computer’s name.

Machinedrum

Thomas Strathmann — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 09:15:09 +0000

So, I got my diploma, got a job, and I got a Machinedrum UW mk2. That’s right, I had been lusting after one of these babies for quite some time now after having a non userwave mk1 model for a week or two some last year. It is limited and I am not sure whether it’s limited purely in a good way. Loading samples is a pain and you only get so many slots to put samples into. And don’t get me started on naming samples and kits. The user interface sometimes feels like something straight out of the 80s. And that’s probably one of the reasons why the Machinedrum is the king of the hill in its domain of purely digital sample playing (and synthesizing) x0x style drum machines: It gives you ideas and you get things done. What’s true of many “hardware instruments” is especially true of the Machinedrum in a way. I can certainly see why many people use one as part of their live setup. And once again it is proved that “You can create art and beauty on a computer.”

Two useful URLs for LaTeX users

Thomas Strathmann — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 17:14:12 +0000

If you’re looking for the name of a specific (La)TeX symbol, you can draw it on the canvas of the Detexify site and maybe one of the suggestions is the desired symbol.

And if you want to look at some LaTeX snippets by searching for parts of it (or for some of the text contained in it), you can try LaTeX Search by the Springer Verlag.