As an academic, I need to track research funds: what is the remaining balance of each grant, how much I have committed for student stipends, what are anticipated expenditures for conference travel, etc. Like everyone else, I used to do this via a spreadsheet, but my spreadsheet was becoming a bit too complicated. So, I decided to try plain text accounting, and use hledger to keep tracks of research funds.

One of my new year’s resolutions was to come up with a sensible way to manage my dotfiles. I evaluated a few solutions and finally settled on GNU stow.

Writing is my primary mode of note taking and at the beginning of the pandemic, I switched from paper notebooks to digital notebooks. My primary note taking devices are SuperNote A6X, Boox Max3, and iPad Pro using Notability App (in that order, though I do prefer iPad for reviewing papers etc. because of the speed). I prefer the writing experience on Supernote, but I do miss one of the software features of Boox: In Boox, every time I save a note file, it is automatically converted to PDF and stored in a pdf directory which mirrors the layout of the notes directory. There is no such feature in SuperNote. Notes have to converted manually and get exported to a flat directory.

Signing PDFs in Linux is always a PITA. Part of the reason is that Adobe stopped the development of a linux port of Adobe Reader since adobe reader v9. Some of the newer PDFs require features which are newer than acrobat v9 and cannot be opened or signed with acrobat v9.

In this page, I summarize some of the options for signing PDF that have worked for me.

As I mentioned in the last post, I am testing out kitty as my terminal emulator instead of UXTerm. So for everything has been smooth sailing except for one minor issue. On my work desktop, I want fontsize 11 but on my laptop, I want fontsize 14. This is a combination of resolution and physical size of the two monitors. Reading the documentation of kitty.conf, it was not clear how to set conditional values for the variables.

I spend a lot of time on the terminal: using alpine to send emails and using vim/neovim to edit tex files and code. For at least a decade if not longer, I have been using UXTerm as my terminal emulator. At some stage I spent some time configuring UXTerm fonts and color schemes to what I like, and I have been using it ever since. Recently, I started experiencing some weird issues with UXTerm, which forced me down a rabbit hole.

Normally, I don’t have to deal with large spreadsheets. I do use simple spreadsheets for keeping track of budgets/investments/taxes etc., but the only big spreadsheets I encounter are sifting through all applicants for hiring students and assigning grades to students. I struggle through OpenOffice Calc to work through these, because navigating spreadsheets is too slow. I recently came across a recommendation for visidata in a thread of HackerNews, and it certainly looks like a program that I should checkout the next time I need to work through a big spreadsheet.

I have been cycling between web browsers for the last few years. I used to use Opera, but then it became a shell for Chrome, then I started using Chromium, but occasonally got huge memory consumption, then I started using Firefox, but lately it has become very laggy (to the extent that even scrolling was slow). So, after testing a bunch of less commonly used browsers, I have finally settled on qutebrowser.

In rencent years, lot of my short conversations with my research lab has moved to Slack. I am not a big fan of closed protocol communication clients, but Slack has the advantage that it is relatively easy to use. Well, it seems that it relatively easy to use for everyone except me.

There are many instances where I want to access the most recent file in a directory: