Posts
Determine your external IP address
It’s sometimes useful to know your computer’s external IP address: that is, the IP address of your NAT router as seen from the outside world. It would be most convenient to be able to do this from a shell, without having to resort to a web site like this one. A quick DuckDuckGo search found this older discussion, but nearly all of the methods described there no longer work. The only ones that worked for me were this:
March 29, 2020
Calculating patron savings in Koha
At least one library is giving patrons a checkout receipt showing how much they saved by using the library. ByWater Solutions has provided a tutorial that shows how to do this in Koha, by adding some template code and Javascript to the HTML for the issue slip. The code works by adding up the replacement costs for each item in the checkout list. For an item that has no replacement cost in its item record, the code uses the default replacement cost associated with that item’s type.
October 22, 2019
Thoughts and Prayers
Here’s a little program to generate a very sincere, heartfelt public response to a tragedy.
March 15, 2019
Using LastPass in Pale Moon browser
#Linux#Software#Palemoon#Lastpass
Firefox 57 introduced a new extension API that broke most of the extensions I had been using, including It’s All Text, Dorando Keyconfig, and Tab Mix Plus. So I installed Pale Moon, a fork of an older Firefox that works with those extensions. But the current LastPass extension only works with the new (57+) Firefox.
February 20, 2019
Adding Redo to MicroEMACS
Last year I added undo support to my ancient fork of Dave Conroy’s MicroEMACS. The undo function has been useful on those occasions where I do something stupid, like justifying a paragraph in, say, a piece of C code. But sometimes it’s possible to go a bit too far with repeated undos and lose some valuable work. The solution was to implement a redo command that undoes an undo.
February 9, 2019
Ispell unable to open default.hash
For some reason, one of my Linux Mint 18.1 machines was not able to run ispell, which gave this error message:
November 23, 2018
Using an HP P1006 printer in Linux Mint 18
#Linux#Linux Mint#Thinkpad#Ubuntu#Printers
Over the years, one persistent problem with using HP printers in Linux Mint has been the conflict between the drivers provided by CUPS (the standard Linux printing system), and HPLIP (the HP software that provides proprietary drivers for some of the company’s printers).
November 8, 2018
Updating ThinkPad BIOS from Linux
#Linux#Thinkpad#Software#Linux Mint#Ubuntu
Updating a ThinkPad BIOS usually involves booting a floppy or CD-ROM containing PC-DOS and an update program, or running a Windows-only updater. Neither of these is an option on a machine like my ThinkPad X200s, which has no floppy or CD drives, and is running Linux only. The various options available to Linux users are discussed in the ThinkWiki BIOS upgrade page. The one option that worked for me in the X200s case is to boot the CD-based updater using Grub2.
September 28, 2018
Microsoft buys Github
For a while now I’ve been publishing my free software projects on Github. But last month Microsoft purchased Github, and that alarmed me.
July 26, 2018
Mailing labels in Linux
Once a year our library sends out appeal letters to donors, using mailing labels that we print ourselves. The librarian keeps a list of donors in a spreadsheet that records their names, addresses, and past donation amounts. Formerly the librarian attempted to use MS Office to generate the labels, but this was an error-prone and time-consuming operation. I prefer to automate processes like this using scripts and open source software instead of GUIs, so I took on this task.
June 22, 2018