Kategorie: English

All articles/posts in english language.

The Virtual Typewriter Museum

The The Virtual Typewriter Museum has the history and pictures of amazing machines.

Like e.g. these:


The Writing Ball

typewriter is one of the great inventions of 19th Century communications technology. Between the 1860s and 1920s engineers, inventors and even carpenters invested all their creativity in the development of the ultimate writing machine. This virtual museum, that is based on private collections of antique typewriters from around the world, is a tribute to their ingenuity.

A nice craft of typewriting machines also resonates emotionally with me. It’s sexy. And so it did not surprise me to find the book Sexy Legs and Typewriters – „Women in office-related advertising, humor, glamour and erotica.“ on the webpage there.

Women and typewriters entered into a sensual partnership of skin and steel the moment at which the first writing machine was operated by female fingers. That was back in the 1870s. Ever since, office girls have fed the male imagination for many different reasons.

Pretty women and typewriters appeared together in advertising; humorous photo series and postcards; glamour photos; and erotica. This richly illustrated book covers all these areas, from the first woman to appear in a typewriter ad to a large collection of nudes from all ages.

Why do I blog this? I like the love in detail and the variety of typewriters built.

Overview of hacker-friendly single board computers

The linux gizmos mag has a nice and helpful review/compilation of all kind of single board computers created in Jan 2017.

Brief reviews on the site look like this:

They also have a spreadsheet online to get the full overview.

Why do I blog this? I always wanted to play around with one of these. I did a bit playing around with Arduino but never went for something more than a 20-40 lines of code. Maybe this helps to get me into a deeper sphere of playing around with these quite powerful things.

Adding Emoji to your LaTeX document

I found a rather quick way to get emoji in my document. But this is the brute force quick way. The russian way. It always works but is not that elegant. PDF-images.

How to

  1. Read this blog post „Emoji in LaTeX documents“
  2. Download the hires emoji-images in this github-repo
  3. Search the emoji-PDF files you need for your document
  4. Copy them to the folder where your .tex-document resides
  5. Define a shortcut/macro to include those emoji-PDF files you need
  6. Include the following code in your .tex-document
\usepackage{scalerel} % needed package to scale the pdf-images perfectly
\def\emojithumbup{\scalerel*{\includegraphics{emoji_thumbup_1F44D.pdf}}{O}}
\def\emojistar{\scalerel*{\includegraphics{emoji_star_2B50.pdf}}{0}}

In your document

This my five star rating
\emojistar\emojistar\emojistar\emojistar\emojistar
I would say \emojithumbup for this easy integration.

Update 17.09.2019

There is a quite interesting LaTeX Website called texample.net where you can see and learn lots of stuff about how to draw something in LaTeX. See following example:

Erreicht wurde das Ergebnis mit zwei Zusatzpaketen für TeX:

TikZ and PGF are TeX packages for creating graphics programmatically. TikZ is build on top of PGF and allows you to create sophisticated graphics in a rather intuitive and easy manner.

TikZ

Was ist TikZ? Nach dem Lesen der ersten Seiten des Manuals bin ich der Ansicht zumindest „T“ steht für Till Tantau den Entwickler. Und bei Wikipedia steht, es stehe für „TikZ ist kein Zeichneprogramm“. Das das eine Rekursion mit Henne-Ei-Problem ist scheint dem Entwickler egal.

With TikZ you get all the advantages of the “TEX-approach to typesetting” for your graphics:
quick creation of simple graphics, precise positioning, the use of macros, often superior typography. You also
inherit all the disadvantages: steep learning curve, no wysiwyg, small changes require a long recompilation
time, and the code does not really “show” how things will look like.
[…]
In practice, TikZ is the only “serious” frontend for pg

PGF

Was ist PGF? Jo, ich hab nach dem Überfliegen des Manuals (pgfmanual_3.0.1a) immer noch keine Ahnung wofür die Abkürzung steht. Typisch MathematikerInformatiker mal wieder.

It turns out that there are actually two layers below TikZ. […] most users will only use TikZ and almost no one will use the system layer directly […]

Why do I blog this? Because when I tried to integrate the coloremoji.sty class in my LaTeX document, I got a series of issues with conflicting textinput encodings not matching the one the coloremoji expects. This way your avoid any new encoding issues by directly integrating PDF-images which is what will happen anyway with that class. maybe you need to include \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx} too.