Recent Posts (all)

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"]],
to 
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!

Adding dynamic syntax highlighting based on the system theme

Hugo Chroma Syntax Highlighting Dark/Light Mode

One of the issues I still had with this blog was that the syntax highlighting for code blocks was static and generated at compile time, whereas the rest of the site changed colors based on the system theme.

I’m glad I fixed it today following the linked article.

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