Spell check in Inkscape!!! (Poster Making)

Text->Check Spelling.

Awesome!

Sonic boom visualized naturally

skip to 1.40min to see something cool

Flowing text in inkscape (Poster making)

You can flow text into arbitrary shapes in inkscape. (From a hint here).

You simply create a text box, type your text into it, create a frame with some drawing tool, select both the text box and the frame (click and shift) and then go to text->flow into frame.

UPDATE:

The omnipresent anonymous asked:

Trying to enter sentence so that text forms the number three...any ideas?

The solution:

• Type '3' using the text tool
• Convert to path using object->path
• Size as necessary
• Remove fill
• Ungroup
• Type in actual text in new text box
• Select the text and the '3' path
• Flow the text

Mencoder: Change speed and size of movie and output such that Quicktime can play it

mencoder input.mp4 -speed 0.33 -vf scale=450:360 -ovc lavc -ffourcc DX50 -oac pcm -o output_slowmo_small.avi

The -ffourcc DX50 makes it quicktime playable
The pcm is needed when we change speed (copy won't work)

TimeTracker - see what files Time Machine is backing up

1.9GB backup! Since yesterday? I work hard, but not that hard. I wanted to see what exactly was getting backed up. Time Machine doesn't let you do that but TimeTracker from CharlesSoft allows you to peek into your Time Machine backups and see what is getting backed up for each backup and how big it is. For instance, its annoying but my email trash is getting backed up. It would, however, take too much time to go through and find every little think that I don't want backed up but is getting backed up, so...

Mac OS X time machine: deleting backups

From here:
You can delete specific folders and files from the backups, deleting all backups if needed. Open a finder window, navigate to the folder, open time machine, click the gear icon and select 'Delet backup'. If you are in the tree view you have an option to delete all backups of the selected folder.

LaTeX equations in inkscape on Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Warning message when trying to use the Tex extension:

The fantastic lxml wrapper for libxml2 is required by inkex.py and therefore this extension. Please download and install the latest version from http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/lxml/, or install it through your package manager by a command like: sudo apt-get install python-lxml

1. Download and install libxml2 and xslt for mac from here. Follow install instructions. 
2. STATIC_DEPS=true easy_install lxml
3. sudo easy_install lxml

Leads to next error message

Contents/Resources/extensions/textext.py:55: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead
  import os, sys, tempfile, traceback, glob, re, md5, copy
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "Contents/Resources/extensions/textext.py", line 933, in <module>
    e.affect()
  File "/Applications/Writing/Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/extensions/inkex.py", line 207, in affect
    self.effect()
  File "Contents/Resources/extensions/textext.py", line 348, in effect
    % ';\n'.join(converter_errors))
RuntimeError: No Latex -> SVG converter available:
Pdf2Svg: Command pdf2svg failed: [Errno 2] No such file or directory;
PstoeditPlotSvg: Command pstoedit -help failed: [Errno 2] No such file or directory;
SkConvert: Command pstoedit failed: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

1. Down load and expand pstoedit from here.
2. ./configure
3. make

Fails, some problem with ImageMagic. From here we can compile without all that.

1. ./configure --without-magick
2. make
3. sudo make install

More later

Mobile phone <-> email (T-mobile)

From here and here:

e-mail to phone:
e-mail address: [phone number]@tmomail.net
Subject:Subject
Body:Body
Resulting SMS:[my email]/Subject/Body

phone to e-mail:
Phone number: 500
Text: [your email]/Subject/Body
Resulting email
Subject: Subject
Body: Body

qmake redux

In QT 4.6 qmake's default behavior has changed. If you just run qmake it will generate an xcode project. You now need to do
qmake -spec macx-g++
To force generation of a makefile

Inkscape, Mac OS X and X11

X11 latest version (XQuartz 2.4) copies stuff as a bitmap by default. Switch that off in the preferences to copy vector graphics.

ALT key won't work, preventing us from doing super script and subscript (kerning with ALT+up or down arrow keys)

ALT key can be made to work like this or this (but I was not successful)

Sizing for posters, talks and papers

Following society for neuroscience guidelines for figures:
Text on figures should be 2-6mm high -> 5.6pt to 17pt
Using figure labeling to be at least 8pt Arial for papers = 2.8mm
Use a scaling of x2 for talks = 5.6mm
Use a scaling of x4 for posters =  11.3mm