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I recently discovered Sublime Text and bought a license even though I rarely use proprietary software for work. That’s how good it felt to me. But if you’re comfortable with an editor like vim, you can make vim feel almost like Sublime, using only free and open source software (FOSS). vim (and emacs) have had many of the features that Sublime has, in some cases for decades. Here’s a very small and simple guide for making vim look and behave a little like Sublime. ...

I’m struggling with those crazy Chinese fonts in Mingti and Kaiti style and couldn’t find a goot Heiti font, but now this page: http://wiki.debian.org.hk/w/Where_can_I_find_fonts_for_GNU/Linux Mentions that there is a perfectly fine Heiti-style font available in Debian: ttf-wqy-zenhei. So do this and be happy: apt-get install ttf-wqy-zenhei Here’s a sort of preview from Wikipedia’s multilingual support page: The samples above are in Heiti, the ones below in Mingti. Putting it into a screenshot makes it look shitty, so you’ll have to install the font (don’t install any other Chinese fonts!) and look at the page zoomed in to see it really well. ...

If you’re running into a ton of problems reading e.g. an ISO-8859-1 encoded CSV file into your (probably UTF-8) Ruby or Rails application, and if the error you get is “Invalid byte sequence in UTF-8” even though you’re giving CSV.open the correct encoding options, here’s a solution. The example CSV file is a tab-separated, ISO-8859-1 encoded file with CRLF line endings. You’d expect the following to work: CSV.open(@infile, "r:ISO-8859-15:UTF-8", {:col_sep => "t", :headers => :first_row}) But it fails mysteriously! Even though the conversion to UTF-8 goes without problems, you get an ArgumentError complaining about some illegal byte sequence. If you analyze deeper, you might find (in this case) a complaint about rn. The solution is very, very non-obvious: You need to specify the row separator in addition to your encodings! ...

Roman Haefeli strikes again: Watchteleboy makes it possible to watch dozens of live TV channels using mplayer in your very own machine, without the need for Flash, a web browser or any other such nonsense. Here’s the source code: https://github.com/reduzent/watchteleboy Here are Ubuntu packages he maintains: https://launchpad.net/~reduzierer/+archive/reduzent Caveat: This only works if you’re located in Switzerland or in some other place that Teleboy’s geotargetting likes (such as Italy).

Give this a look: http://www.boingboing.net/2011/05/12/vegan-black-metal-ch.html Thanks, lix! 🙂

In my quest for more freedom from companies that don’t take privacy too seriously (such as Facebook or Google), I found a fantastic FOSS replacement for Google Reader: Tiny Tiny RSS. It does everything important that Google Reader does and even has its own little syncable native Android app called ttrss reader (available through the Google Android Market). The only additional feature I’d appreciate is a Reader Play-style view for very important tasks, such as scrolling through large amounts of animated gifs or lolcats quickly. Tiny Tiny RSS’s code seems to be clean and concise, though, so it might not be that much work to make such a feature if I ever find the time (which won’t happen). ...

This is a great Google Suggest Venn diagram generator: http://www.technomancy.org/google-suggest-venn. Only a fool would suggest that not being part of the EU makes a country rich and expensive 😛

Most PCs come with onboard audio circuits that, at best, sound OK. But there’s a cheap way out of that. The Music Streamer by High Resolution Technologies. It’s an external USB sound interface with a very good D/A converter. This is a semi-audiophile device, yet it costs only about the same as your average USB audio interface these days. This isn’t made for 5.1 surround sound, it only has two analog RCA (Cinch) outputs to hook up to your amp. Of course you can also play games in stereo on it and watch films. Both sounds crystal clear. ...

Since I’m switching many machines from Ubuntu to Debian, I was wondering if I could just keep my home partition intact and simply install Debian “over” Ubuntu, or if that would cause major problems with application configuration files etc. Here’s the good news: It’s absolutely no problem to sidegrade from Ubuntu 9.10 to Debian squeeze (testing). I chose to keep the /home partition unformatted in the installer, but formatted the / partition. When the system rebooted, I logged in and my entire desktop looked exactly the same as under Ubuntu. Even my GNOME settings were intact, down to the desktop background. ...

I used to have a mirror of all sorts of decryption tools here, but the legal situation has improved over the last few years so that this is no longer necessary. Instead, I am happy to refer you to Apprentice Alf’s blog with his decryption tools.