Radio interview with Jos Baijens and the real Dutch spirit

While leaving Amsterdam behind me, driving, I was listening to Radio 1. They were interviewing Jos Baijens, high-school teacher in Eindhoven, whose popularity recently increased for wearing a muslim scarf in public, as a protest for a proposal by Geert Wilders, which would like to introduce a 1000€/year tax for women who wish to wear such a scarf for religious reasons in public. Baijens was so contrary to such a proposal, that he decided to wear the scarf in the same way muslim women wear it, in public.

Besides agreeing or not with the proposal or with the protest, I was impressed when the presenter asked Jos what his children had to say when they saw him “scarfed” like a woman. Being Italian, I expected the children to say whether they agreed or not with his father. No. They said (roughly translated) “Dad, if you think it’s important to do so to express your opinion, you should do it”. They didn’t say “Dad, you could be a Wal-Creature” or whatever; instead they expressed all the Dutch tolerance by simply saying that he could do as wished. No support, or lack of support of his idea. They simply don’t care, do they? They simply mind their business. It’s all very Dutch, you know.

Speaking of emails

Merlin Mann on emails

If you work a lot with emails, then you should watch (or hear) this talk by Merlin Mann.

Background color with Skim

Today I stumbled upon a Lifehacker article which explained how to change the background color in Adobe Reader, when displaying PDF (which could alleviate the eyes’ stress if reading a lot). Well, it turn out that the same can be accomplished with my favorite OS X pdf reader, Skim (from version 1.3.4 on). Just open Skim, then fire up Apple Script editor, and paste the following code

tell application "Skim"
set theColor to choose color
set page background color to theColor
end tell

It is not a great hassle to do it once, but if you plan to do it more frequently, you can save the script as an application, and then drag it to the Finder toolbar, so that you will always have it available

Add Copy as PDF Shortcut in Mathematica

To add a shortcut for the Menu Item Copy as PDF you have to do the following (with a Mac) go to

/Applications/Mathematica/SystemFiles/FrontEnd/TextResources/Macintosh

and edit the file

MenuSetup.tr

changing the line

MenuItem["PDF", FrontEnd`CopySpecial["PDF"]],

MenuItem["PDF", FrontEnd`CopySpecial["PDF"], MenuKey["C", Modifiers->{"Command", "Option"}]],

In this way Command + Option + C will copy the object as a PDF in the clipboard.

Web of Science, Papers and Leiden University

To use Leiden ezproxy with Leiden university you have to do the following. Open with Textedit.app the file

~/Library/Application
Support/Papers/PlugIns/SearchEngines/WOSSearchEngine.searchengine/Contents/Resources/gatewayurl.txt

replace the address there with the following

http://wok-ws.isiknowledge.com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2048/esti/soap/SearchRetrieve

Beware: there must not be any newline at the end of the file gatewayurl.txt (if you editor places them automatically, change editor for a moment). Then fire up Papers. Go to Preferences -> Sources and as Authentican URL use

http://wok-ws.isiknowledge.com.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2048/esti/soap/SearchRetrieve

Check the box Go to this page when Papers is started. As Library Proxy use

http://ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2048/login?url=%@

Restart Papers. You should be prompted for the Leiden University username and password. Fill them in. You should now see something that says

SearchRetrieve
Hi there, this is an AXIS service!
Perhaps there will be a form for invoking the service here...

X11 and System Fonts in Mac Os X

If you also have experienced some problem accessing fonts presents in /System/Library/Fonts with X11 applications (like Inkscape and The Gimp), then you may have found the solution: copy the fonts you would like to use from /System/Library/Fonts to /Library/Fonts, restart X11 and..retry!

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