Maciej Janicki's website

2020

2020-11-08 Following science journals via RSS

Working in academia means having to follow the current state of the research. The “usual” way to do it is downloading PDFs from websites of conferences and journals. It is needless to say that this is terribly inefficient: it requires us to remember when something new is expected to appear, manually navigating through the website etc. Even worse, recently there is a trend to increasingly rely on social media (Twitter, ResearchGate) and bloated, proprietary, data-mining “bibliography managers” (like Mendeley) to get suggestions on what to read. In this post, I describe an efficient, distraction-free and privacy-protecting workflow for keeping up with the latest research.

2020-09-26 Executing code chunks from Vim

Recently “notebook” applications like Jupyter and RStudio have become a popular way of teaching and practicing programming. Their advantage is making programming interactive: you write several lines of code, then execute it and look what happens. You can tinker with your complex data structures and try unfamiliar functions out without the need to rerun the whole script each time. However, this also comes with the massive disadvantage: you are locked down to a GUI application and cannot edit the code with a decent text editor. In this tutorial, I show how to achieve the same effect using Vim, the standard REPL console, and tmux to connect them.

2020-09-20 Having all PDFs just a few keystrokes away

I tend to have a lot of PDF files on my computer: books, science papers, presentations… I often need to quickly open one of them: check a theoretical detail in a book related to what I’m doing or a reference in a paper I’m reading. With the help of dmenu and a short shellscript, I have found a way to make this process as quick and unintrusive as possible.

2020-05-03 Announcing chesstools

The long weekend has been very fruitful for me: after some hours of coding, I can proudly announce version 0.1 of chesstools - a suite of minimalist tools for chess study following the UNIX philosophy. The main component of the package is pgnvi - a vi-like editor and browser for PGN files. It comes with a simple graphical application for drawing the chess board and a few other tools. You can get the package from my Gitlab or Github pages.

2020-01-25 Happy new decade!

It’s been a while since the last post and for me it was a time of big changes. After having received my PhD, I moved from Leipzig to Helsinki to work as a postdoc at the university here. Of course the relocation, getting used to a new country and starting a new job meant a lot of work and effort, which is why I was too busy to update this site for a while. But everything went more than fine and I’m doing well here up north. As for the site, I have a lot of notes and unfinished articles lying around, so now that I’ve settled in the new place, I might share Linux tips more often. Well, I’m not promising anything, we’ll see.