I use an application called BibDesk to maintain my BibTeX files. I basically have only two of these files: One for my own publications and one for any reference I have ever looked at or cited. I keep these in a particular folder that is under git version control and synchronize it across the computers I use. On all these computers I use BibDesk with exactly the same settings for automatically generated cite-keys and other goodies. So far so good. That’s not the story here.

Everything was working fine until very recently: Started to notice that the application... Read more.

This post is a little memory aid for myself, as I repeatedly had the problem of having to re-set up my ruby/gems/bundler environment. I need this mainly to run jekyll.

The key is to get the shell environment set up correctly and to install bundler. Bundler then takes care of setting up jekyll and its dependencies based on an appropriate Gemfile that resides in the root directory for my homepage. In that directory I only have to say bundle and everything happens automatically from there, at least as long as the above mentioned prerequisites are met.

Do you write letters that have bibliographies, like scientific reports? Do you like to typeset your letters in LaTeX using either the class letter or scrlttr2? Then the letter class option file provided below might be just the thing you want: It facilitates alphabetically numbered references for letters that otherwise would not provide a thebibliography environment. You can use this file either as in

\documentclass[bib,<other lco files and options>]{scrlttr2} 

or, if using the standard letter class (or any other document class, really), by loading the code as