A few weeks ago, my profile stopped working. It seems that mark has found a solution. I changed the profile and it can be downloaded here.
New iPhone/iPod touch wireless profile (RuG-FN2)
July 8th, 2009Weird characters in bash
June 29th, 2009
Scrambled character set
A friend of mine had a problem with his terminal today. Most people will encounter this one day or another. He asked me how to fix it. I told him to do ‘cat /bin/bash’ and press ^C at one point and repeat this until it worked. He was surprised that worked and asked me why. I told him I didn’t know exactly, but that it had to do with control characters that are often found in binary files but I was curious myself to so I did some research.
Apparently there is an ANSI escape sequence to select character sets. To select one of these character sets, the ANSI code ‘ESC(0′ is used. Because terminals will catch the escape character, we have to do some extra to get a literal ESC: type ^V ESC. The character will be displayed as: ‘^[‘. Typing this will result in a terminal that looks like the image above:
bash$ echo '^[(0'
You can get the correct character set back by typing ‘ESC(B’, but maybe a better idea is to reset the terminal (the program ‘reset’ will not always reset the character set) with the following ANSI code: ‘ESCc’. For this command we don’t have to use single quotes to avoid the parenthesis from being interpreted, so this easier to remember:
bash$ echo ^[c
So whenever you get this problem, remember to press these 4 keys (ok, I count a control character as one key): ^V ESC c ENTER
LaTeX acronyms and \acrodef
June 29th, 2009Writing for my thesis, I found that when I used \acrodef to define (silent) acronyms produced error messages. I use \acrodef instead of \acro I don’t want a list of acronyms, I just want the first one written out full and the next acronyms written in the short form.
The error message is in the form of:
Latex Error: ./acronyms.tex:3 LaTeX Error: Something's wrong--perhaps a missing \item.
This confused me. It turned out that I should not use \acrodef inside an acronym environment. So instead of this:
\begin{acronym}
\acrodef{DOF}{Degrees Of Freedom}
\end{acronym}
I should do just this:
\acrodef{DOF}{Degrees Of Freedom}
This solved the problem (no error message anymore, and the acronyms are placed in the text as I want).
Wireless profile for iPod/iPhone for University of Groningen
June 10th, 2009The University of Groningen is connected to eduroam, but it also has it’s own similar wireless network, RuG-FN2. Connecting an iPods touch or iPhone is therefore also similar.
Connecting with Eduroam can be done by following the instructions on this site, and for RuG-FN2, there is also this website, but the latter profile will always ask for a password and this is tedious to type in everytime, especially if people can see what you type.
Therefore I made my own profile, which can be downloaded here. Just surf to that page on your iPhone/iPod touch and accept the configuration. Fill in your username and password and you’re good to go. Of course, you need internet access to do that, so you can do this in advance (for example at home).
update: the network changed, find your new profile here
Removing that sync menu bar item
June 9th, 2009
This is a post about Apple’s sync menu bar item. Apparently it’s used for syncing mobile devices as well as for Apple’s MobileMe account (if you have one). It’s not really in the way, but it takes up space and I sometimes confuse it for a different menu bar item, so I wanted to delete it.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, this post is not for you :)
Apparently, you can disable it in the preferences of MobileMe, but only when you have signed up for an account (if you search in System Preferences, the option shows up, but if you select it, you get a dialog that says you have to sign up first).
After some searching, I found this thread: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1633095&tstart=0, that explains that you can ALSO disable it through preferences of the program iSync (I don’t know if it’s pre-installed, but it was on my computer).
A third option was to remove it by CMD+dragging it out of the menu bar, but it seems that is only temporary.
Yeah, more space in my menu bar for things that I actually use :)