bfirsh

+1 I did stage work when I was younger and this was one of the most valuable things I took away from it.

Over-under is good for long, thick, delicate cables (e.g. mic/guitar cables). For shorter, thinner cables (e.g. USB cables) I use this technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXMG917XsvU

I have done it so much I can now do it quickly without looking at my hands, so I just automatically do it before putting a cable away or in my bag.

I now never have to detangle birds nests of cables. Over the course of the ~15 years I have been practicing responsible cable storage, that must add up to a lot of time.

Do you know whether that includes websites in Safari? If I can’t use 2FA for that, I don’t see how I can use a Yubikey.

The Yubikey website is vague, but it seems like the lightning end only works with a few apps (1Password, Brave, etc). What do I do if I want to sign in to anything else that needs 2FA? Do I still need a TOTP app?

Here's an HTML version if you're on a phone: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1907.06520/

MathJax can render server-side if you want to speed that up: https://github.com/pkra/mathjax-node-page

If you're on a phone, here's an HTML version of the paper: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1907.05954/

If you’re on a phone, here’s a web version: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1905.01051/ (now with linked citations!)

You might like this LaTeX to HTML converter I'm working on: https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo

What primitives do you think need adding to TeX? LaTeXML, which powers Engrafo, does a pretty good job of converting plain TeX, as well as LaTeX.

If you're on a phone, here's an HTML version of the paper: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1811.10948/

Bitmapped images should be full size. Extracting proper vector graphics is a work in progress: https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo/issues/247

If you want to extract figures/images from PDFs, the best way to do it is to use Adobe Illustrator (or equivalent... Inkscape maybe?). That’ll let you extract full sized bitmapped graphics or arbitrary parts of the PDF as SVG vector images.

Also worth noting MathJax 3 is a thing, which is going to be even more modern and faster.

https://www.mathjax.org/MathJax-v3-beta.3/

Ah - yes, I agree. We did have a link to show you how to set up a development environment when it broke. I’ll add that back.

What are your papers? Maybe it’s an easy fix. :)

We tried using KaTeX for https://www.arxiv-vanity.com but unfortunately it doesn’t support a lot of commonly used stuff. I forget what most of that was now... over/underbrace is one I recall.

In the end we used MathJax pre-rendered on the server, which is the same speed as pre-rendered KaTeX: https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-node

We’ve also done lots of tweaking to make it support as much stuff on the arXiv as possible. Our MathJax config is a fun read: https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo/blob/master/src/conv...

A good podcast episode about that: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/06/692155923/epis...

To those thinking of using this service, you might want to read this first: https://theoutline.com/post/1953/how-a-vc-funded-company-is-...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653

I had a similar experience to your last one. I was in a small house fire in a shared Airbnb. I left immediately. Airbnb wouldn’t compensate me because I didn’t take photos and the host claimed nothing had happened. (I was honestly too shaken to even think I would need evidence.) They gave me a $200 voucher which didn’t cover the time left in my stay.

It is partially my fault for not getting evidence, but you’d think they would do more for somebody who, like you, has spent an awful lot of money on Airbnb.

Unfortunately they often have the best apartments available in a city. I do still use them, but I’ll search alternate sites first.

I did this trip in my own car this year, from the UK and back.

The article is a bit dishonest about what the highway is like. The majority of the Pamir Highway (the M41) is actually in quite good condition. There are just occasional unpaved stretches, notably the mountain passes and the stretch down to Khorog. The flat bits have good, wide tarmac that you can do 60mph on.

Still - it was a good lesson in being prepared. There are not many people passing by, so you really don't want to be breaking down. Winter was drawing in when we were there, making it extra dicey.

The real adventure is getting off the Pamir Highway. The Wakhan Valley, Zorkul Lake, the Bartang Valley. That is where my best memories are from, and where most of the photos in the article seem to be from.

Apart from the landscapes, my other fond memory is of the Pamiri people. They are such kind, warm people. It is engrained in their culture to care for travellers. When you live in such a hostile environment, you have to look after each other out of necessity.

It was also interesting seeing how their quality of life has changed recently. There is no cell service, and electricity only in the two large towns. But most of the places we visited without electricity now have cheap solar panels from China. The influx of tourism means that everyone runs a homestay and can start to afford things like that.

I have been meaning to write up the trip in more detail. I haven't recorded it particularly well yet. A few photos are on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bfirsh/

The thing that drew me to Hyper.sh in the first place was the fact that it used the Docker Remote API. That gave me some confidence it would be provider agnostic. Unfortunately no other providers have done this, so that idea didn't pan out.

Indeed. This is a headache for me.

My service is entirely dependent on Hyper.sh and there seems to be no trivial migration path. I think I shall have to drop everything I was planning to do after the holidays and rearchitect for Kubernetes. :(

A few years ago, I ran a similar company that I also shut down, so it would be hypocritical of me to complain much. Competing with AWS is hard. (We did give users 3 months to migrate though.)

For background, this is done by NHS digital: https://digital.nhs.uk

They are a cultural descendant of GDS, who make GOV.UK amongst other things: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/about/

All of GOV.UK is open source in a similar way: https://github.com/alphagov

(Source: I worked for GDS.)

Here's a web version if you're on a phone: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1812.03651/

Churner, curious for more. Email's in my profile. Thanks!

If you're on a phone, here's an HTML version: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1410.6753/

The article fails to mention these are called "superpressure" balloons in case you're interested in reading more about them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpressure_balloon

There are some fantastic amateur projects doing similar things, such as this 11 gram payload (!) that circumnavigated the earth 6 times: http://leobodnar.com/balloons/B-64/index.html

If you’re interested in an actual TeX distribution for the web, I’m working on something like that: https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo

It’s based on LaTeXML, which does the heavy lifting of converting LaTeX to HTML. I’m more interested in the CSS applied on top of that. I want to make web output of the same calibre as the PDF output. (Or, near to it at least. :)

If you’re on a phone, here’s an HTML version of the paper https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1806.06726/

I really want to switch from Evernote to something else, but one of the main things I use Evernote for is scanning, OCRing, and organising real documents (mail, receipts, etc).

What is a good alternative for this? I’m willing for it to be a separate system to note taking.

Nothing at all, as long as you don’t mind the unreliability of a single server. (I am the author of Compose.)

Honestly though, I would probably use Heroku for deploying little apps like this. The Compose CLI’s sweet spot is development environments.

Edit: There are even official docs for this https://docs.docker.com/compose/production/

Here’s an HTML version if you’re on a phone: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1808.00811/

I use Airtable for this stuff too. Unfortunately it doesn’t work offline (not even reads!) so I’m very close to reverting back to spreadsheets.