I made straight lines & cover page labels for my #reMarkable

2023-11-16 update: since release 3.8, which happened yesterday on my tablet, straight lines are now available as a new feature!

I recently acquired a second-hand e-ink tablet. The reMarkable2 comes with very little but specific features which optimize for efficient note-taking mainly, and for some sketching.

For the latter, the only assistance available is a few templates that afford guide lines, and the possibility to work with layers. In both cases the handling tools consist of a couple of erasers and a selection tool which lets you resize, rotate, copy and paste (except for what you typed as text, it only works for what you put on “paper” with the “pen”). No warping, no inversion, no tool to create any common shape or make a straight line.

Yet it knows of straight lines because when you use the highlighter on a PDF or EPUB file, it can “snap to text” and your highlighter strokes are transformed into straight lines.

I don’t know how others manage, when they prefer not to “jailbreak” (for lack of a better term) their tablet, but I don’t care whether I can display a custom image while my tablet is sleeping, but I do care about straight lines and shapes that are scalable. So I drew some and made a PDF of the pages.

How I use them

Note: the illustration pictures are post processed with a filter to give them a slight background that changes the colour (the eggplant colour should in fact be black, the red is in fact much more vivid.)

Horizontal and vertical lines of various thickness and lengths, and one rectangle

I made horizontal lines of varied thickness and length, a few vertical lines too, and a rectangle.

When I need a line, I navigate to this page in my templates folder, use the selection tool to copy it, navigate to my destination page, and tap the pen. Then I drag it where I want, stretch it or shrink it, rotate it if I need. And repeat as often as needed.

Oval black label with hand-written text in white reading: Notes & thoughts

For this cover page label, I used one of the black oval shapes I hand-drew, copied it with the selection tool, navigated to my notebook page, pasted it, and gave it the size I wanted.

Then I added a new layer. I chose the calligraphy pen, thick size, and white ink and wrote. The layer protects the oval if you erase or select and move your words.

Black rectangles of various sizes stacked on top of each other with white hand-writing inside to look like a cover

This is exactly the same instructions as the oval label, but selecting all the black boxes of various sizes and using the medium-sized calligraphy pen nib.

In this particular notebook, I used the same cover page for each of the modules. I duplicated the first one, moved it to the right place, selected the layer where I wrote and made changes.

Large red circle and red outer outline within which is hand-written in white: My evil schemes, and in block black letters underneath: Book 42, year 2023

This is page 14 of the PDF I made. I duplicated the whole page and moved it as cover page of a new notebook. I could have selected the shape, copied it, and pasted it elsewhere, but I wanted the circles at exactly the same place.

DIY: edit yourself IN a WWII pro-bicycle poster

Originally published as a thread on Mastodon.

I had fun with a little photo editing on iPhone 🤗

I am helping by cycling when I can!

Pixelated version in colour of me riding a mountain bike added to the poster instead of the black and white business man on his bike

Even though today’s context is different from when the original poster was made, we still ought to save fuel, avoid carbon emissions, and generally exercise! 💪

I may use this as my avatar on some platforms maybe.

Original propaganda poster from the early 1940s

Original propaganda poster from the early 1940s 'You are helping by cycling when you can', showing a black and white middle-aged man in suite carrying a briefcase and riding a bicycle.

I used as background the poster ‘You are helping by cycling when you can’, printed in Britain in the early 1940s during the Second World War to remind people to conserve fuel resources which were rationed.

Look, I made a template!

Empty poster with text only
Template poster ‘You are helping by cycling when you can’

I made the honorable black and white cyclist disappear, and share it here, so you can save it, in case you’d like to edit yourself IN and state you care about saving fuel, avoiding carbon emissions, or generally exercising! 💪

Make your own!

Here’s how I did it on iPhone with the built in Photos app, and Tayasui Sketches (I think you can get by with the free version).

In Photos:

  • choose the photo of you in your camera roll
  • long press yourself till you see the outline and the “copy|share” button appear
  • Tap “copy”

In Tayasui Sketches:

  • select “New drawing”
  • at the top, in the … menu, select “import” then select “Photos”
  • choose the template image I provided
  • … menu, “import”, choose “paste”

Adjust and 🎉 tada!

Show me the results?

If you’ve followed this tutorial of sort, share your version, please!

Book: “Persuasion” by Jane Austen

Cover of the book showing a painting of a young woman reading next to an elderly woman

Ah, the wit of Jane Austen is sharp in this novel, and enjoyable as always. 

It is laid out a lot like a theatrical play. Many of the scenes could be played in their own stage. Except perhaps the long walks and the beach strolls. 

This novel is her shortest, I think. However, I was stricken by the over-abundance of the word “and”.

I may return to this post with more to add. I only finished it now after starting it yesterday, and I may need to let it sink.


2022-07-27 update: “and” appears 2802 times (*) in a total of 227 pages (24 chapters). That’s 12.3 per page

(*) [After starting to underline them in my book, I found it tedious and unreliable, so I found an HTML version of the book, stripped it of non-novel cruft using emacs and then piped a word count to a grep, embracing the nerddom, but then ran a better grep(**) command which my colleague Bert Bos supplied and explained, because the simpler one would find hand, grand or wander, but not And,]

 (Wed, 27 Jul 2022 01:11:29 CET)-(koalie@gillie:~:)$grep and /Users/koalie/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com\~apple\~CloudDocs/Downloads/Persuasion\,\ by\ Jane\ Austen.html | wc -l
    2590

(**) (Wed, 27 Jul 2022 07:11:31 CET)-(koalie@gillie:~:)$grep -E -i -o '\band\b' /Users/koalie/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com\~apple\~CloudDocs/Downloads/Persuasion\,\ by\ Jane\ Austen.html | wc -l
    2802

(where -E = enable regexps, -i = case-insensitive, -o = put every occurrence on a separate line, \b = word edge) [Thanks Bert!]

My other website behind the curtain

I’ve been editing the W3C website for a few decades now (gasp!) and in leading its redesign from the 2008 design, I am learning an astounding amount of new things about it! Here are some of the things I know about it.

Illustration of a spotlight lighting a man running, graphs and a book

Spotlight on the W3C website

In the 21 years I’ve been with the W3C, I remember only 3 different designs, the current one dates from a decade ago. Redesigning our website is crucial to improve the overall experience of those who depends on our Web standards work.

The website is managed by W3C itself and has been up for three decades. It currently contains over 2 million web pages. They’re static HTML or built in Perl, PHP, come from WordPress or are custom built using Symfony.

Illustration showing a woman at her computer leaning against stacked objects adorned with a gear

Tech stack summary

  • Debian Linux
  • Apache is used for serving the static content
  • MySQL for database storage
  • Varnish HTTP Cache is used for full-page caching
  • HAProxy is used for load balancing
  • There are over 3,700 Apache .htaccess files with different rewrite rules
Illustration showing hands at a keyboard in front of a screen

Hosting & content

In a large-scale hosting setup, there are around 100 servers running Linux Debian on OpenStack, of which 20 to 30 servers are related to the primary website.

Web content is stored mostly in CVS and databases via CMS tools (WordPress, Symfony), and secondarily in GitLab and GitHub.

Most content is managed as static HTML edited locally (e.g. emacs, vi, BlueGriffon) and committed into CVS repositories using CVS clients, the terminal or HTTP PUT or WebDAV. Or, content is generated dynamically using Symfony or statically via makefiles, XML and XSLT.

25 instances of WordPress power the W3C Blog (over 950 posts) and W3C News (over 4,200 items), but also our Talks, working groups blogs, a test site, and W3C Community and Business Groups.

Illustration of an alien beamed by a UFO

The W3C Homepage

The current homepage of the W3C website is a mix of HTML snippets which usually appears elsewhere on the W3C site, generated via XML, XSLT, PHP and other tools:

  • The News items are read from WordPress
    • The “homepage news” category determines what to show on the W3C homepage; we typically show up to 9 entries
    • The “top story” category determines which news item is expanded on the W3C homepage; we prefer to feature one, but have at times shown two or more
  • The right-hand side shows the last three posts from the W3C Blog
  • W3C Member Testimonials rotate from a database
  • The Events and Talks are shown from a Symfony app and WordPress respectively
  • The search bar links to an external DuckDuckGo search (that we chose for its good reputation for data privacy)
  • The rest is static

Markup errors in any of the source files will likely “break” the homepage. On average, I break the homepage 10% of the time!