ps2ascii test.pdf | wc -w

Answer: 10198. Whew! Still in the game.

• Honk your Zipcar’s horn with your iPhone to find it in a crowd
• Unlock and lock your Zipcar with your iPhone after scanning your Zipcard at the start of each reservation

If you are subscribed to an RSS feed from one of my old sites, those should continue to work. If you want to subscribe to this site, there are a number of choices:

• http://feeds.kaivonfintel.org/kvf-all: all posts
• http://feeds.kaivonfintel.org/semanticsetc: only posts about semantics etc.
• http://feeds.kaivonfintel.org/academicgeek: only posts about (academic) geekery
• http://feeds.kaivonfintel.org/complacencies: only posts about life
• http://feeds.kaivonfintel.org/kvf-comments: all comments

If you install LAME, which is an open source MP3 (en/de)coder, TiVo Desktop will use it to convert AAC files into MP3s on the fly and stream them to the TiVo box. One can get the latest source for LAME from the SourceForge site for the project. It compiles out of the box (I think) with the usual encantations (./configure and make and sudo make install). One can also find OS X binaries, but what I did is to have installed by the MacPorts system.

Once the program was installed (MacPorts install into /opt/local/bin/lame, but TiVo expects it in /usr/local/bin/lame, so I had to create a symlink), I could stream my ripped music to the TiVo box. This still doesn’t let you stream music bought from the iTunes Store but it’s a start.

I found this tip on MacGeekery where it was posted without acknowledging the source but the hack seems to have been discovered by Dennis Wilkinson as posted to the TiVo Community forums.

One last hitch: the first time I did this on my Intel MacBook Pro, all I got was static. The solution was to save the following script as /Library/Application Support/TiVo/lame and make it executable:

!/bin/sh

exec /usr/local/bin/lame -x $*

The new version of the Mac OS X operating system is now available. Normally, I’m a very early adopter with new software like this. But this time, I’m just too busy with work and will need to wait for the winter break. I can’t wait! In the mean time, John Siracusa’s review at Ars Technica is a great read.

There is a much expanded second edition of The LaTeX Graphics Companion. It has a chapter on Beamer presentations, which I look forward to reading, even though the Beamer manual is itself a great piece of work. It doesn’t seem to treat PGF and TikZ, which would be my choice, if I had to produce heavy duty graphics.

The book apparently was threatening to burst at the seams, so the two chapters on PostScript fonts and PostScript drivers and tools, updated and expanded with information on TrueType, Opentype fonts, and PDF utilities, are freely available online. A quick look shows some really good information on fonts in LaTeX.

There is a LaTeX package at CTAN that might be useful for class handouts etc.: sectionbox.

This collection of files contains a LaTeX package for sections surrounded by fancy boxes, primarily intended for use within posters (e.g. made with sciposter.cls). A (pdf) manual is included as well.

The TeX user group has offered the fonts at a discount for members for a while now. They charge $90 for members for the complete set (the non-member price is $140).

An alternative vendor is PCTeX, who normally charge $129 for the complete set of Lucida fonts. PCTeX has an “academic price” of $99, which is almost as good as the TUG-membership price.

But what occasioned this particular post is that PCTeX is offering a special sale right now: $79 as the academic price for the complete set of Lucida fonts.

[I already have the fonts and use them for some projects, e.g. the circulation manuscript of this paper.]

defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8"

Why? Because Windows email clients may display messages originating from Apple Mail much more faithfully. And in any case, everybody should be using UTF-8 anyway.