Hippocamplus My Second Memory

Internet

Misc tools

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is a “search engine that doesn’t track you”. It provides nice “bangs” to search directly specific websites. By making DDG the default search engine these bangs can be used directly in the address bar.

  • !pub PubMed.
  • !scholar Google Scholar.
  • !bioc Bioconductor.
  • !so Stack Overflow.
  • !git GitHub.
  • !w Wikipedia.
  • !syn synonyms from thesaurus.com.
  • !tz Time Zone, time in other places.
  • !dgi DuckDuckGo Images.
  • !i Google Images.
  • !imd IMDb.
  • !marmiton Marmiton.
  • !map Google Maps.
  • !wref/wrfe Word Reference English to French (et vice versa).
  • !gtfr Google Translate to French.
  • !gten Google Translate to English.

Ubuntu

I’m using Ubuntu Gnome 16.04.

  • I followed some of the steps there to install essential packages.
  • To enable the use of my existing DSA SSH keys I did:

echo "PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes +ssh-dss" >> ~/.ssh/config

  • To force the second screen to follow the workspace of the primary screen I found this:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.overrides workspaces-only-on-primary false

Sync a specific Google Drive folder on Ubuntu

I use grive and followed these instructions.

To install:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grive

To configure in a directory DIR, syncing the Drive folder “ArticlesPDF”:

cd DIR
grive -a -s ArticlesPDF

In the future just sync by running the following command (in the DIR folder):

grive -s ArticlesPDF

I usually try with the --dry-run option first because there are some glitches sometimes.

Since very recently (~Nov 2019) another step is necessary:

  1. Create a API key on https://console.developers.google.com/apis/library following those instructions.
  2. Run with grive -s zotero-library --id "<ID.apps.googleusercontent.com>" --secret "<SECRET>" (eventually add -a to configure).

Sync PDFs between Mendeley and Google Drive

See this post. Edit: I switched to a “Zotero + Google Drive” solution, see below.

Zotero

Mostly following this blog post.

In the general settings of Zotero I also specify the Google Drive folder as base directory and swich off the Sync full-text content.

Then using the Zotfile plugins to make sure the PDF files are consistent between computers. The configuration I use is:

  • Pointing at the Google Drive folder, with subfolders by authors /%a.
  • Chaning to lower case and replacing blanks in file names.

For the Better BibTeX plugin, the most important setting is the citation key style: [auth:lower][year][journal:lower:abbr].

I use FolderSync to sync the PDFs that I annotate on my Android tablet. I rarely need to manage/explore my library on my Android device (I usually just sync then read/annotate the most recent PDFs), but when I do I use the ZotDroid app. Not great but the best I could find.

Dowload files from Dropbox

By replacing https://www.dropbox.com with https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com in the link, a file can be dowloaded using command lines tools (e.g. wget or download.file in R). It’s useful to host files that are used in scripts, like some of the post I made using R-Markdown.

Originally it was useful to “serve” HTML pages but it doesn’t work anymore.

Record a webradio stream with VLC

VLC doc

vlc -vvv http://hazel.torontocast.com:2220/stream --sout=file/ogg:classical.ogg