tl;dr I wrote an fzf extension that completes flags for the current command from your history. This makes it easy to build invocations with lots of flags, or to remember the spelling of a rarely used flag. You can find the code here . This post assumes you already know about fzf and have it installed. If you don’t, a lot of this might be confusing. It is incredibly useful, and is as valuable to my workflows as vim and tmux.
Last week I successfully defended my PhD thesis. It is titled Designing Technology for Existing Infrastructure in the Developing World. The word ‘thesis’ has been described to me as a single sentence that encapsulates the red thread connecting all the work you’ve done. The ‘dissertation’ is a document supporting that thesis. The thesis itself is supposed to be straight forward and not blow any minds. The mind blowing happens in the 100+ pages of supporting evidence in the dissertation.
GatesCambridge.org has a new article up featuring my work with Mamás del Río . I’ve written previously about the work I’m doing with MDR. The Gates article does a great job providing additional perspective as well as some recent developments with the project.
In February I went to Peru to meet with Magaly Blas and Isaac Alva, two global health researchers at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (UPCH). UPCH is based in Lima, but Magaly and Isaac have projects both in and outside of the capital. When I was living in Lima in the last half of 2014 I started working with them on a project based in the Peruvian Amazon. The project is called Mamás del Río .
Momentary is an Android keyboard with one function: entering today’s date. I find myself entering today’s date multiple times a day when I’m using my phone. Under normal circumstances this is a pain to type. 2016-05-25, for example, is at least 10 clicks, and this is even worse if you’re relying on long presses. Momentary to the rescue! When you select Momentary as the input method, it enters today’s date and immediately returns to the previous input method.
LaTeX is the de facto standard tool for writing academic papers. When working with groups I generally find myself using Share LaTeX . Share LaTeX is a great way to collaborate Google Docs-style one a LaTeX document, and it has a very forgiving compiler that in general seems to get things right. As is the case with so many other things, however: editing LaTeX is better with Vim.
For a long time I’ve used Dropbox for my photo imports. I now have a pretty complicated system for how I store them, but something I liked about Dropbox was that it imported photos with file names like 2016-04-18 14.10.47.jpg. To me this is a much easier way to think about photos than the default serialized version used by the camera, and it hides the ugly file names that differ across screenshots taken on my phone, photos uploaded by my phone, and photos manually imported from my different cameras.
When I have a directory I am going to be moving around a lot I use the following command to find all files, create checksums, sort in a file, and write to a file: find . -type f -exec md5sum "{}" + | sort -k 2 \ >2016-04-18_photos2016-03_md5sums_barbet1tbB.chk This should sit at the top level of the folder you are dealing with. I back up my photos month by month, for instance, and I keep one with each of my yyyy-mm style directories.
When I first picked up vim I dealt with plugin functionality by hand. I have no idea how I did this, as doing it manually now seems insane. No doubt it was because I didn’t have many plugins. I soon switched to Pathogen . For quite a while after that I was using Vundle . Vundle was working well, thanks to a very easy Plugin 'user/repo' syntax in my vimrc that made plugins painless.
When I redid my site to use Hugo I also redid my favicon . I wanted this favicon to also serve as the Add to Home Screen functionality provided by Chrome . I expected Chrome to automatically scale up the favicon. When I designed it I made it pixelated on purpose, so some very crude scaling was just what I wanted. Unfortunately Chrome doesn’t scale automatically, so my add to home screen icon was just a blue square with a white S set in the center.