Accessing the Oynx Boox built-in note templates
Posted: July 21, 2019 Filed under: boox, e-readers Leave a comment »The Oynx Boox electronic notebook allows you to choose different backgrounds, known as templates, for your notes. Some standard templates that come with the reader are 20 line lined paper, big and small grid graph paper, and so. There are also some “cloud” based templates (To-Do list, SWOT diagram, piano score, and so on) that are stored on a remote server somewhere (Oynx is quite bad at telling you where cloud based material it uses is stored).
These templates are PNG files (though you can also use PDFs, I discovered). If you make your own, then you store them in the /noteTemplate directory to make them accessible to the note app.
I decided I wanted to make my own, based on some of the built-in ones. But I couldn’t for the life of me find where they pre-set ones are stored. I went through the manual, searched every directory on the device, and googled all over. Read the rest of this entry »
Jumpin’ Flash Jack: Fixing a jumpy touchpad on the Dell XPS 13 9370 (Ubuntu OEM) under 19.04
Posted: July 1, 2019 Filed under: dell-xps-13-9370-developer-ubuntu-oem, Linux Leave a comment »Touchpads are notoriously jumpy things in Linux.
In my case I was having real trouble with the touchpad. Hitting a key would often (at random intervals) cause the cursor to relocate to wherever the pointer was in the screen. It made any kind of work with the touchpad next to impossible. There are controls for this (including a “disable the touchpad while typing” command), but they didn’t seem to affect performance at all.
Dell has an advice page on fixing this that was developed for the 16.04 LTS Ubuntu (I.e. Read the rest of this entry »
Jumpin’ Flash Jack: Fixing a jumpy touchpad on the Dell XPS 13 9370 (Ubuntu OEM) under 19.04
Posted: July 1, 2019 Filed under: dell-xps-13-9370-developer-ubuntu-oem, Linux Leave a comment »Touchpads are notoriously jumpy things in Linux.
In my case I was having real trouble with the touchpad. Hitting a key would often (at random intervals) cause the cursor to relocate to wherever the pointer was in the screen. It made any kind of work with the touchpad next to impossible. There are controls for this (including a “disable the touchpad while typing” command), but they didn’t seem to affect performance at all.
Dell has an advice page on fixing this that was developed for the 16.04 LTS Ubuntu (I.e. Read the rest of this entry »
“Have you checked it’s plugged in?” Fixing the touchpad after an Ubuntu update (by turning it on)
Posted: June 30, 2019 Filed under: dell-xps-13-9370-developer-ubuntu-oem, Linux Leave a comment »After the last Ubuntu update (the last before today’s), I suddenly lost my touchpad. It worked during boot, but not after log in.
I did the usual searching around for people with similar problems (and it seems to be something that comes up, going back years—which can be a problem, since Ubuntu has gone through some pretty fundamental changes in how it handles devices over the last few years). I followed the advice at the Ubuntu debugging page. Running cat /proc/bus/input/devices showed that there was a touchpad being detected (though not a synaptics touchpad as all the examples seem to be):
I: Bus=0018 Vendor=06cb Product=76af Version=0100
N: Name="DELL07E6:00 06CB:76AF Touchpad"
P: Phys=i2c-DELL07E6:00
S: Sysfs=/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:15.1/i2c_designware.1/i2c-1/i2c-DELL07E6:00/0018:06CB:76AF.0001/input/input12
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=mouse0 event9
B: PROP=5
B: EV=1b
B: KEY=e520 10000 0 0 0 0
B: ABS=260800000000003
B: MSC=20On that page I read that some ti Read the rest of this entry »
Resetting a Dell TB16 Thunderbolt dock
Posted: March 11, 2019 Filed under: Computers, Linux Leave a comment » I have a TB16 Thunderbolt dock to act as a hub for my screens, internet, camera, and so on. This afternoon I came back from a meeting and my computer was hibernating and the doc was dead: no power light, no light on the thunderbolt cable, no response to commands, and no screen, sound, or internet pass through. Looked through the Dell troubleshooting guide and found nothing. In a chat with a tech, they told me how to reset the dock, humblerise.com(I don’t see this anywhere obvious on the Dell site):-
- Unplug the dock from power and from the computer
- Hold the power button on the dock down for 45 seconds
- plug everything back in
Fixing sensitive mouse on Dell XPS 13 9370 “Developer Edition” (i.e. Ubuntu 18.04 OEM)
Posted: March 10, 2019 Filed under: dell-xps-13-9370-developer-ubuntu-oem, Linux Leave a comment »I was having trouble with the mouse being too sensitive on my touchpad. After googling around I found this Dell page. I’ve followed the instructions (it was last updated Feb 2019), with the following changes and modifications:
- substituting
18.04for16.04in all kernal and file names (e.g. in Step 3); - substituting
51-for*in Step 5 iii in the file namesudo gedit /usr/share/x11/xorg.conf. Read the rest of this entry »
Recovery key for Dell XPS 13 OEM Ubuntu (Developer edition)
Posted: February 9, 2019 Filed under: Computers, Linux | Tags: dell, developer edition, recovery key, ubuntu, xps Leave a comment »Just bought a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition with OEM Ubuntu (18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver) installed.
As I was setting the computer up for the first use, it asked me if I wanted to create a recovery key (i.e. disk or USB), but indicated that you could also do this later. I didn’t have a USB key with me, so I skipped the step.
Once I got set up, however, I wasn’t able to see where I could access the utility to make the recovery disk. I thought the dialogue during set up had said the Ubuntu app store, and various Dell sites seemed to indicate either the app store or launchpad. Read the rest of this entry »
2018 Executive Board Election results
Posted: January 14, 2019 Filed under: About Leave a comment » 2018 Executive Board Election has concluded. As this was an approval only ballot, so we have all four nominees elected to the board. Congratulations to incoming Board members (in alphabetic order- last name): Barbara Bordalejo, KU Leuven, BelgiumMarisol Fila, University of Michigan, United States Rahul K Gairola, Murdoch University, AustraliaBrian Rosenblum, University of Kansas, United […]2018 Executive Board Election results
Posted: January 14, 2019 Filed under: About Leave a comment » 2018 Executive Board Election has concluded. As this was an approval only ballot, so we have all four nominees elected to the board. Congratulations to incoming Board members (in alphabetic order- last name): Barbara BordalejoMarisol Fila Rahul K GairolaBrian Rosenblum Thanks to all the members who voted for this ballot. Gurpreet Singh and Daniel O'Donnell […]2018 GO::DH Executive Board Candidates
Posted: January 6, 2019 Filed under: Announcements Leave a comment » Global Outlook::Digital Humanities is holding its Executive Committee elections. According to the approved bylaws that establish procedures by which GO::DH is governed, four out of eight of the seats on the executive committee are up for election this year. Each executive serves a two year (renewable) term. The election will be open for members to […]Conway’s Law and Open Science: Why it feels like something’s fundamentally not right
Posted: October 29, 2018 Filed under: Research-and-comment, research-communication | Tags: conway's law, public good, scholarly communication Leave a comment »Some very quick notes on some reading I’ve been doing today on Conway’s law
The law basically has to do with the way organisational structures reflect themselves in the products they produce (also known as “mirroring”). So, to give a common example, corporate websites usually reflect the interests and organisational structures of the corporation rather than the information needs of the website visitor: a statement from the president welcoming you (who ever goes to a website for that?), tasks and locations grouped by reporting line rather than relevance to topic or user, and so on (Nielsen also makes this point in Designing Web Usability).
There are many different formulations of this law, ranging from the very software-specific to the very general. One interesting one, however, is in Coplien and Harrison’s Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development:
If the parts of an organization—such as teams, departments, or subdivisions—do not closely reflect the Read the rest of this entry »
English 204: History and Future of the Book
Posted: May 5, 2018 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »About English 204: History and Future of the Book
The calendar describes English 204 as
[a]n introductory history of the concept and technology of the book. The course focuses on the development of the book as a vehicle of communication and on its ideological and political impact, with some attention to the emergence and consequences of digital platforms such as e-mail, the web, and electronic books.
As we will see, “book” in this description is a kind of synecdoche (a use of the part for the whole). What we really mean by “book” is “public communication”: literature (fiction and non-fiction), science, history, news, letters and contracts, even, in some contexts at least, Social Media posts and hastags (we will define what we mean by some of these terms in our first few classes). While much of the course will be concerned with books in the usual sense of the word, we will also be looking at some of these other forms of communication, including oral poetry, the role of tradition Read the rest of this entry »
Finding files modified within a specific time period
Posted: April 21, 2018 Filed under: Computers, Linux Leave a comment »I had been working experimentally on a file a couple of days ago and forgot to change the name to something meaningful. I remembered roughly when I was working on it and would recognise the name and context when I saw it (probably). But the problem is how to you find the relevant files? Stackoverflow to the rescue (as always), with a bit of man find:
find /home/dan/ -name *.xml -mtime -2 -ls |moreIt’s all pretty self explanatory except the -mtime -2: the utility, the start directory, any restrictions on the file name (you want to use this if you are searching a home directory: I have 10k+ files, it looked like before I added it, given all the cache files from the web browsers), the time period in days (-mtime), and a ls-style display. |more is a pipe that allows you to look at the output in segments if there is more than a screen’s worth.
-mtime is the only funny bit: it searches back the number of days expressed by its value. If the value is positive, it searches bac Read the rest of this entry » Using Zenodo as a personal repository
Posted: March 30, 2018 Filed under: Research-and-comment, research-communication | Tags: academia.edu, institutional repository, researchgate, scholarly communication, zenodo Leave a comment »More and more academics are using services like academia.edu and researchgate as personal repositories. This is in part a way of ensuring your research gets wide exposure (and hence is more available for citation). But it is also part of an increasing sense among academics that one “ought” to put off-prints and pre-prints of research “out there” for others to find. This is being encouraged by Open Access mandates that encourage or require researchers to post copies of their work (i.e. so-called “Green Open Access”), either in last manuscript version or as soon as the embargo period is over at the journal of record.
As the University of California Office of Scholarly Communication points out, however, Academia.edu and ResearchGate are not really Open Access repositories: they are social networking sites for academics that use offprints the way Facebook uses pictures of your family—as a way of getting friends and colleagues to come to the site and click around. Read the rest of this entry »
How to accept an invitation to a SSHRC application (Partnership Grant 2019)
Posted: February 10, 2019 | Author: dpod | Filed under: Research-and-comment, Universities | Leave a comment »This is a quick guide for my non-Canadian partners on how to accept an invitation to participate in a SSHRC application.