Luke Peterson

Compost Education

2019-11-23T19:28:47-08:00

Cassandra and I went to a composting and vermicomposting class at Martial Cottle Park</a>. The park is 287 acres, and is about 7km from our house and is really beautiful. It was gifted in 2003 by Walter Cottle Lester to the State and County for development of a public park that informs and educates the public about the agricultural heritage of the Santa Clara Valley. The class was free and we got to take home several bags of organic compost; San Jose residents get a pretty good deal</a> on composters or worm bins through the city of San Jose. We already have a Greenes cedar composter</a> to which we've been adding all our kitchen scraps, weeds, and garden trimmings, but we'll probably be getting a worm bin and start keeping worms. We are in the early stages of re-doing our yards with native plants, fruit trees, and raised beds; we expect the worm bins to be helpful sometime early to mid 2020.

We learned a few things:

Breaking sticks/branches/twigs down with a chipper will accelerate the composting process. We are on the lookout for a used electric chipper now. They seem to range in price from $100-$200, and then a big jump to over $1000.</li>

So long Pelican, hello Hugo

2019-11-18T20:04:14-08:00

My bro Brem</a> recently updated his website to use Hugo. I've been meaning to resurrect my defunct Pelican blog for a while, but after putzing around with Pelican for a while I still hadn't made it happen. After taking a look at Hugo, and playing with Brenden's blog as an example, I decided to make the switch to Hugo. So far, so good.

The sources for this blog are available here</a>.

If you'd like to follow my blog, there is an RSS feed is here</a>.

LaTeX workflow

2013-09-09T00:25:00-08:00

In the last several years, the common workflow for using LaTeX has changed since I first learned it. In particular, bibtex has been to a large degree superseded by biblatex-biber</a>. Additionally, while I used to use pdftex</a> to build pdfs, it doesn't support unicode. After reading Joel Spolsky's article about unicode</a>, I decided this is a hard requirement, so pdftex was out. While both XeTeX</a> and LuaTeX</a> projects have addressed this issue, it seems like XeTeX is more mainstream. Finally, for the build process, I used things like Vim-LaTeX</a> or AucTeX</a> (or sometimes a manually written Makefile</code>). The latexmk</a> package (not to be confused with the LaTeX-Mk</a> package, which hasn't seen an update since 2010-12-28 and is not part of the MikTeX distribution) now does an excellent job of managing the building of your pdf. This post outlines my new work flow that takes advantage of the latest tools in the TeX/LaTeX world.

First, install TeX Live</a> (use your package manager if you can so you automatically will get updates). The first thing to set up is latexmk. latexmk has a few options that are worth configuring (man latexmk</code> will give you all the gory details). I put the following in my ~/.config/latexmk/latexmkrc</code>:

# Choose xelatex as the default builder of pdfs, don't stop for errors, use synctex</span></span>
$pdflatex = </span>'xelatex -interaction=nonstopmode -synctex=1 --shell-escape %O %S'</span>;</span></span>
# .bbl files assumed to be regeneratable, safe as long as the .bib file is available</span></span>
$bibtex_use = 2;</span></span>
# User biber instead of bibtex</span></span>
$biber = </span>'biber --debug %O %S'</span>;</span></span>
# Default pdf viewer</span></span>
$pdf_previewer = </span>'evince %O %S'</span>;</span></span>
# Extra file extensions to clean when latexmk -c or latexmk -C is used</span></span>
$clean_ext = </span>'%R.run.xml %R.synctex.gz'</span>;</span></span></code></pre>
Open up your favorite editor and create example.tex</code> with the following contents</p>
\documentclass</span>{</span>article</span>}</span></span>
\usepackage</span>[backend=biber]{</span>biblatex</span>}</span></span>
\usepackage</span>[pdfencoding=auto]{</span>hyperref</span>}</span></span>
</span>
\addbibresource</span>{references.bib}</span></span>
</span>
\begin</span>{document}</span></span>
Numbering should start at zero~</span>\cite</span>{</span>EWD831</span>}.</span></span>
\printbibliography</span></span>
\end</span>{document}</span></span></code></pre>
and references.bib</code> with</p>
@unpublished{EWD831,</span></span>
  author = {Dijkstra, Edsger W.},</span></span>
  pages = {3},</span></span>
  title = {{Why numbering should start at zero}},</span></span>
  url = {http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF},</span></span>
  year = {1982}</span></span>
}</span></span></code></pre>
Now to have latexmk build example.tex</code> into the pdf enter this into your terminal</p>
latexmk</span> -pvc -pdf</span> ./example.tex</span></span></code></pre>
This should immediately build your pdf and open it up using evince</code>. In
another terminal, start editing the .tex file or the .bib file. As soon as you
save example.tex</code>, example.pdf</code></a> should automatically be
rebuilt and the updated result shown in evince. This can sometimes be
problematic if there are build errors, but the -interaction=nonstopmode</code> will
prevent the build from hanging so once you fix the problem it should
automatically get fixed. latexmk automatically determines dependencies, so if
you have files included/input into your main .tex file, it will update the
build appropriately as soon as it detects a change to the file (not just a time
stamp change, but an actual content change).</p>
I haven't yet gotten synctex to work with vim, but that option is enabled above
so it should just be a matter of figuring out how to configure vim correctly.
I'll leave that for another day. Also, there is another TeX build automation
tool called arara</a> that looks pretty
promising. It looked like a bit more work and it didn't come bundled with
TeXLive, so I stuck with latexmk, but I'll keep an eye on arara down the road.</p>