I maintain a significant BibTeX database with all the scientific literature that I ever come across. Recently, I needed to publish a list of recommended literature for a course I was teaching at the University of Passau.

As many other German universities, Passau is using an online platform called Stud.IP where teaching staff can maintain course material and provide easy access for students. (As a side note, this system is very mature and user friendly, quite the opposite to certain other systems with similar intentions like PAUL).

Anyways, uploading a list of publications is a breeze if you... Read more.

I just acquired a Logitech presenter (a remote control just for presentations). It’s advantages over the Apple remote control are the built in laser pointer and buttons that can start/stop your presentation, advance and go back a slide, and to turn the screen black.

However, the buttons for turning the screen black and for engaging/disengaging the presentation mode did not work out of the box. I am using Skim as a PDF presenter, but the problem is similar with Adobe Reader: They react to different key codes than the ones sent by my remote control.

Specifically, the remote sends... Read more.

Most of us Mac users are using MacTeX nowadays, which is a Mac version of TeX-Live. If you also use MacPorts you might, like I did, run into the problem that Macports likes to install another copy of TeX-Live to satisfy dependencies. It just doesn’t care that there already is a copy of MacTeX available on the system.

Here’s a workaround. Suppose you want to install pdfjam. This little program requires pdflatex and some packages like pdfpages. Suppose you have all those installed already. Then go to the command line and navigate into /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/textproc/pdfjam. Here... Read more.