Tech – Page 2 – Tech, writing, and tech writing

Doc tools: Overleaf

I’ve been working a lot with LaTeX this year. On my laptop, my preferred toolset is WinEdt and MikTeX, but I’m intrigued by the more portable looking solution of Overleaf.

Overleaf is a web-based LaTeX editor that allows you to store and edit your content in the cloud. You can sign up for a free account if you won’t be using it much, or a monthly subscription to add more projects plus a few extra features.

The site has a good catalog of existing templates you can choose from to start a document, article, presentation, CV, or whatever. They even provide an interactive tutorial to get you up to speed if you’re not too familiar with LaTeX. More advanced users can upload whatever custom/specialised templates and resources they need.

The split-view, web-based editor shows your editable markup on the left hand side, and a dynamic preview of the results on the right hand side. As I’m writing this, there’s a beta RichText view of the sources which shows a bit of a mashup of WYSIWYG and source content depending on which document I’m looking at – I guess it renders what it can parse sufficiently and leaves the rest in its raw format.

The free plan has a limited number of files per project (60), and an overall space limit of 1GB, but you can have as many projects as you like within those constraints, and get almost all the bells and whistles. Also, as seems to be a trend with many cloud-based services, they offer bonus space and features in return for social media interactions, inviting friends, and the like.

If you’re looking for a collaborative/cloud-based solution for your LaTeX project, you’ve little to lose by taking Overleaf for a test drive.

Pinning tabs in browsers

Chrome and Firefox let you “pin” content you want to appear in your browser all the time. (Other browsers may do this too – IE doesn’t seem to.)

To do this:

Go to the URL for the content you want to pin.
Right-click the tab and click Pin tab.

You’re done!

Your pinned tabs:

Open automatically when you open the browser.
Are shrunk down to show the favicon for the URL only, not the page title.
Don’t change focus/close if you click a link in them – the link opens in a separate tab.

I’ve found pinned tabs particularly useful for keeping a Google inbox and calendar open, plus the web interface(s) for whatever communication tool(s) is/are flavour of the month with the team(s) I’m working with.

Fun with Skype

Here are a few “fun” things I’ve discovered you can (sometimes) do with Skype.

Disclaimer: Some of them seem to work intermittently, or only in certain versions of the software.

Use the s/old/new/ regex for text substitution to replace a word or words in your previous message. This only seems to work up until the other chat participant “interacts” with the conversation in some way, though, and it’s not clear what counts as an interaction (typing something, definintely; clicking or scrolling in their Skype window, possibly).
On Windows, right-click and select Edit message on any message you’ve entered in the past hour.
Hit the up arrow to go back and edit the last line/block you sent.
Enter /showplaces and hit return to see a list of places you’re currently logged in with this Skype account. This seems to work for me, showing me as logged in from my desktop and iPhone.
Enter /remotelogout to log out all sessions except the current one (where you’re typing the command). This particular command seems a bit flakey, and may be dependent on the platform(s), Skype version(s), and alignment of the stars. Worth trying if you’re stuck. Run /showplaces again after to see whether the other sessions terminated or not.

Pandoc

I’m a bit of a junkie for markup languages: I’ve used many, experimented with more, and am always eager to try a new one. Pandoc is a delight of a tool that allows you to convert from one markup language to another. There’s a proper, installable tool you can put on your local machine to handle full files, which will do a whole lot of the work for you, but you’ll still need to do some clean up on the results.
Something I find useful in itself, though, is the Try pandoc online demo. Continue reading “Pandoc”

Retrieving deleted files on Google Drive

Previously, I described how you can retrieve earlier versions of a file on Google Drive if you realise you need to roll back for any reason. But what if you’ve already deleted the file you want to roll back to? Well, again, subject to policy and space availability, Google Drive may well allow you to retrieve an archived version of a deleted file too. Continue reading “Retrieving deleted files on Google Drive”