A trip report from our Canada Day 2013 long weekend kayak camping trip to Thormanby Islands, Smuggler Cove & Secret Cove, on the sunshine coast.
On Saturday morning, we packed up our tent & got picked up by Erika from Talaysay Tours, who drove us, with the Kayak on the roof, to Welcome Beach, about 15 mins further up Highway 101, past Sechelt.
We unloaded the Kayak, took it down to …
Most of the .PNG files on this site are the ‘blueprint’ style diagrams, like this one:
I create these in Inkscape as vector .SVG files & export them to bitmap .PNG files. I then re-compress them, to ensure that the image files that are used on the live website are as small & quick to load as possible.
As these diagrams have a fairly limited colour palette, I can get lots of extra compression by reducing the colour depth of the final .PNG files from the default 32bit (millions of colours) to 8bit (256 colours) - without any …
Thunar - XFCE & XUbuntu’s small but perfectly formed file manager - has a simple mechanism that allows you to easily add new commands to the right click menu of files and folders. These are called Custom Actions and are easy to create… here’s how to do it.
Click the Edit menu, then click ‘Configure custom actions…‘. This will take you to the Custom Actions Manager, where you can create, edit or delete your custom actions.
You can enter anything into the command box, including complex bash scripts, names of scripts or executables on the PATH, or the full path and filename of the command you want to run.
On the ‘Appearance Conditions‘ tab, you tell Thunar when you want your item to appear in the right click menu:
This is a Pelican plugin to calculate various statistics about a post and store them in an article.stats dictionary. You can see this in action in the sidebar on the left of this site.
I wanted to implement the nice little “X min read” thing from Medium - and it turned out that it was easy to provide a few other interesting stats at the same time, for people to use in their templates.
The returned article.stats dictionary contains the following:
wc: how many wordsread_mins: how many minutes would it take to read this article, based on 250 wpmword_counts: frequency count of all the words in the article; can be used for tag/word cloudsfi: Flesch-kincaid Index/ Reading Easefk: Flesch-kincaid Grade LevelFor example:
{
'wc': 2760,
'fi': '65.94',
'fk': '7.65',
'word …
reddit, the insanely popular internet community, had 71,435,935 unique visitors last month, with over 2,360,783 people logged in [1].
I say people - but it turns out that not all the denizens of reddit are human. There are also bots. Lots and lots of bots. How many? No-one really knows. [2]
This is an interesting and somewhat shadowy facet of the otherwise very public reddit community, so I thought I’d take a closer look…
A reddit bot is no different from any other user, as far as reddit is concerned. The only difference is that rather than a human logging in to upvote cat pictures and …
Seemingly like everything else in the world, Stack Overflow is getting more & more competitive as time passes. Gaining a good reputation - and even finding good questions to answer - is becoming harder and harder, as more and more people compete for less and less unanswered questions.
This is fantastic if you want to find an answer - but makes it much harder for newcomers to get started and build a reputation on the site.
This guide will help you jump-start your reputation on StackOverflow and help you get more out of the site.
Use the no answers page, the …
I switched my XFCE machines over to use Compton for window compositing today - and it’s a noticeable improvement.
A compositor glues your stacks of windows together to form the final image that you see on screen. It’s responsible for any fancy effects like drop-shadows, as well drawing windows while dragging, resizing and minimizing or maximizing them. [1]
Compton does this beautifully. It does one thing and it does it well. It provides glassy smooth, tear free compositing and supports a few tasteful effects - drop shadows, fades and transparency.
I stumbled across this while searching for something else and found a great guide in the NeoWin forums [2], where most of this info comes from, so thanks ViperAFK.
You’ll need to switch of any existing compositing you’ve got running, otherwise this won …
My wife and I currently live in Canada, and our families are back in the UK. We’d been using Skype to chat with people in the UK, but I was getting frustrated with Skype’s limitations: it either ties you to a computer and WiFi, or running a battery hungry app which slows down your phone. It doesn’t work very well over the 3G phone network here and while it’s free to make Skype to Skype calls, it’s fairly expensive calling real phones. I didn’t really want to buy a dedicated Skype phone - we both already have mobile/cell phones. And, to top it all off, the Skype software for Linux is the poor cousin of the Windows one …
Continue reading “Magic Phone Numbers: My VOIP Setup, with voip.ms”By default Pelican does a great job with figures and images, thanks to built-in support in ReStructuredText [1][1] . Pelican will turn this rst input:
.. figure:: {static}/images/better-figures-images-plugin-for-pelican/dummy-200x200.png
:align: right
This is the caption of the figure.
The legend consists of all elements after the caption. In this case, the legend consists of this paragraph.into this HTML output:
<div class="figure align-right">
<img alt="/static/images/dummy-200x200.png" src="/static/images/dummy-200x200.png" />
<p class="caption">This is the caption of the figure.</p>
<div class="legend">The legend consists of all elements after the caption. In this case, the legend consists of this paragraph</div>
</div>Which, given this CSS:
/* Styles for Figures & Images */
img {
border: 1px solid #bbb;
border-radius: 3px;
padding: 4px;
float: left;
margin: 1em …As I mentioned previously, this site was put together using Pelican - a static site generator, written in Python.
Static site generators take your content, pour it into your templates and output the result as static pre-generated HTML, CSS, JS & image files. You can then just upload the resulting folder of output to your server and you’re done. All you need on the server is a web server of some sort, like Apache or Nginx - anything really - all it’s doing is serving static pages.