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I recently had occasion to explore some alternate screencast applications, since ogv files ceased playing back sanely on one of my systems. That issue was ultimately addressed by "upgrading" the video card in my aging Pentium 4 computer (with an old 128 MB nvidia card I got for $15). But not before I investigated some alternatives to recordmydesktop.

Ok, grappling with this xmodmap issue has caused me to revisit the issue of inputting non-latin characters under Linux, something I dealt with a few years ago. Finally, with helpful hints gotten in on-line forums and reading various README files, I had some success. I observe now that I displayed a bit of prescience back then as well.

This entry is somewhat mis-titled. What I did with xmodmap wasn't exactly fun. Maybe mildly rewarding, finally. But also a bit perturbing.

In this installment, I'll recount how I recently composed a nice business letter using TeX/LaTeX. A template will be provided, along with some basic explanations, that could be useful to those wishing to create their own letters using this document processing system.

newsbeuter bills itself as "the Mutt of RSS feed readers." Read this reviewer's enthusiastic endorsement of this fantastic, text-mode RSS feed reader.

I really do have things other than outlining with nano to write about. Really I do. For example, there's the project of installing the Tinycore distribution on some older machines in our computer lab to write about--something I did about a month ago and about which I've already started an article. But I've gone on kind of a jag with this nano project lately, and it's complex and foreign enough to me that if I don't record it now, I'm liable to forget important details. So, you're forced to endure another installment on it. :)

As a follow-up to the last installment regarding creating outlines with nano, I've done some further experimentation with LaTeX and wanted to post here a template I created. The template contains the mark-up that, when appropriately applied, can turn a nano outline into one that prints nicely on a page. After running pdflatex on the created file (which should be given a *.tex extension first), a nice pdf can be output for sending to the printer.

nano, the old stand-by, low-resource console editor, is probably most often used for quickly editing computer configuration files. It seems also sometimes to be used by programmers for writing programs or editing code. Some of us non-programmers can think of other uses it might serve, such as writing documents or creating outlines. This article will discuss some of the uses I've tried to make of it and some ideas I have for further deploying it.

The following offers a description--prefaced by a narrative about whence came my inspiration--of a rather kludgy GNU/Linux solution I cobbled together for enhancing my on-line lectures with a video element. I am far from being technically adept as a GNU/Linux user, having only lately in my 11 years of GNU/Linux use become reasonably proficient at administering my own small stock of GNU/Linux machines and my small LAN. Despite a lack of anything that could really pass as expertise in this field, I want to offer this description for two reasons: 1) it may be of help to others who are equally inexpert as I am and who wish to do something like what I've done; and 2) perhaps those who are more technically adept will weigh in and offer corrections, point out alternative applications, make suggestions for improving what I've come up with, or all of the above. It is with these caveats that I offer a description of my humble and rather unsophisticated attempts.