Githug is an interactive text-based game (or a series of challenges, if ‘game’ isn’t the word), that helps you learn git. It has a series of levels, each of which requires the knowledge of some git commands to solve. Two more levels were added today on checking out tags and solving merge conflicts. You can install the latest version with,
gem install githug
It’ll work on any operating system, given ruby gems is installed. Currently githug consists of 41 levels of increasing difficulty, and more will be added soon.
Some of the first levels in githug (click on the pic to zoom)
Mumford & Sons became famous with their widely acclaimed debut album ‘Sigh No More’ in 2009. I was a huge fan and was stunned to find out that they had released their second album almost two months back. We really need some RSS feed thingy to get selective notifications of new albums.
Babel, the new album, is pretty good, much like the previous one. I listened twice and it didn’t hit me like Sigh No More did, but still, Babel’s got that unique Mumford & Sons style and lyrics. According to Wikipedia,
… Babel debuted at number one on the UK Album Chart and the US Billboard 200. It became the fastest selling album of 2012 in the UK, selling over 158,000 copies in its first week, and was the biggest selling debut of any album in 2012 in the US, selling 600,000 in its first week.
That’s big. I’m having mixed feelings, but if you liked Sigh No More’s folk-rock, you won’t find Babel disappointing.
This friend of mine wanted to print a PDF as a booklet, i.e. with two pages printed in each A4 page so that it can be folded to make an A5 sized booklet. It works as shown in this pic. This requires a software that can rearrange the pages accordingly. I had heard of this tool called Booklet Creator but, even though it’s advertised as free, the free version lets you convert only up to 6 pages. And the license is $20. Ridiculous.
What do you do when you need to find an alternative to a software? Check out AlternativeTo.net of course. It led me to this free and open-source tool called pdfbook that lets you do exactly the same. It works in Linux only though (it may work on Windows but will need some work). Also, the tool has some dependencies which need to be installed. In Linux this is usually not much of a problem thanks to package managers. If you’re on Ubuntu/Debian, the steps to install pdfbook is as follows:
- sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-recommended
- Download the pdfbook tarball from here and extract
- Go to the extracted directory and install using make install
Now pdfbook is ready to use. The following command will create a booklet:
./pdfbook -2 original.pdf destination.pdf
CrossOver is a a wine-based platform that lets you install Windows software in Linux and OS X machines. According to OMG!Ubuntu, they are giving away the software for free for today only. Just go to this page, enter your name and email and grab the deb (or the relevant package for your distro). Only a few more hours left (coz today means October 31st in Central Daylight Time).
The Ubuntu Geek article on this reports,
Few days back, CodeWeavers started a campaign ‘Flock the Vote’ announcing that they will release CrossOver for free if 100,000 Americans pledge to vote in the 2012 Presidential elections.
CodeWeavers failed to reach stated goal of 100,000 pledges. However, CEO Jeremy White has now decided to give away CrossOver for free anyway.
This CrossOver package usually costs $59.95.
I’ve been installing stuff and tinkering with the new Ubuntu install for the past three hours. There’s a good collection of Unity lenses listed here. Sadly, the porn lens doesn’t seem to work, at least in my country.
The Faenza icon set and the Faience theme are the shizz! Gives everything a decent look, much much better than the original Ambiance theme. Instructions can be found here. After installing, I set the themes using Unsettings, a new handy tool for messing with Unity settings.
Some other stuff installed today were nautilus-dropbox, preload (which speeds up the OS by pre-loading mostly used apps) and guake.
There was this question in Stackoverflow today about a leading caret (^) in the SHA of a commit. This is easily reecreatable as follows:
As the answer to the question explains, this is how boundary commits are represented in Git. A boundary commit is a commit that does not fall into the time-frame on which a command is executed. For example, if you use a parameter like –since=3.weeks, the commits before three weeks are considered as boundary commits. In the above scenario, it’s the root commit. According to the git-blame man page, you can use the –root option to not treat root commits as boundaries.
Evernote has finally released Skitch for Windows. It comes in two flavors: Skitch for Windows Desktop and Skitch for Windows 8. I tried out the former and it’s just amazing. Ability to pixelate and highlight the captures comes really handy if you’re into software development or design (or whatever you do with the computer). And the best thing is that it integrates with Evernote, so you can have all the captures and annotations in one place. Skitch was available for Mac and iOS for a long time and the Android version came some time back. Features and some cool uses of the new Windows client can be found in their blog post.
The official Windows client has also been updated with Skitch integration.
Serj Tankian had launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund ORCA, or his first real symphony as he calls it. And, guess what, he’s reached his goal of $25,000 with $41,257 of pledges! These include three $1000 pledges who will get a sit-down lunch with Serj among other cool stuff! Oh man. If only I had $1000 to spend.
The first ORCA symphony will be performed by Serj on 28th October in Austria.
Installed Ubuntu 12.10 yesterday (see the post in the other blog). One of the first things to install in the new OS was Everpad, an Evernote client integrated to Ubuntu and Unity, and found out that it’s been updated to 2.0. Now you can attach pictures and add tables to the notes. Sync issues seem to have reduced as well.
But the best thing is that Everpad is in active development. We badly need a good Evernote client for Linux, something better than NixNote. Everpad is on the move.
Came across this article on Kivy for Android on Hacker News. According to kivy.org, Kivy is
an open source Python library for rapid development of applications that make use of innovative user interfaces, such as multi-touch apps.
The widgets look pretty and the samples seem to have sophisticated and rich interfaces. The graphics are in fact drawn by hardware-accelerated OpenGL commands. The widgets are written in C to improve performance. I went through some of the Docs and the learning curve seems to be surprisingly short. I’m yet to build a package for Android, it’d work without much fuss hopefully. Will keep you updated.
And the best thing is, it’s Python; not the ugly Java.
