After some recent macports upgrade pdftk and ImageMagick’s convert staterted to abort with an error message that the function malloc had failed due to some object pointer being freed that hadn’t been allocated beforehand. It looked like this:

pdftk(1088,0x7fff70ea8cc0) malloc: *** error for object 0x10418c880: pointer being freed was not allocated *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug Abort trap 

How to fix this? I tried to up- and downgrade various packages without much strategy at first, which produced some packages that wouldn’t build at all any more. I finally resorted to removing all outdated... Read more.

I often forget to clock out in emacs org-mode. And I often would like to find org-mode items where I have previously forgotten to clock out. Here’s a little function that lets you do exactly that. Put it into you .emacs file, so that the function gets defined when emacs starts up. Then, in an org-mode buffer, just say

M-x org-find-dangling-clock

to find the dangling clock item.

And here’s the function:

Do you have a pile of old print-outs of PDF documents on your desk that correspond to different versions of the same file, but you can’t see which printout corresponds to which version? And the file in question sits in a git repository?

Well, your prayers shall be heard. Here’s the answer to that mess: Just watermark each PDF before you print it with the git commit id. You can find out the current git commit id with git describe --always.

How to get that onto you PDF? Either use a pen or pdflatex with the pdfinput and tikz... Read more.