There’s plenty of guides to getting going on Mastodon, aimed at people leaving Twitter. I just wanted to post a couple of technical points about making the switch that might be of interest to people who maintain webpages with Twitter content (feeds, embeds). Mastodon status updates (feed/timeline) Twitter provided a widget that meant that an account’s timeline could be embedded on a website.

Setting the document font this way works for ConTeXt, LaTeX, and HTML output. The fonts used in docx or odt output must be controlled with the reference document instead. The default LaTeX engine is pdflatex, which only supports TeX’s own font format and cannot use the TrueType or OpenType fonts installed on the system. However, XeLaTeX was written with that in mind; switching to that engine allows to specify any font available on the system.

Setting the document font this way works for ConTeXt, LaTeX, and HTML output. The fonts used in docx or odt output must be controlled with the reference document instead. The default LaTeX engine is pdflatex, which only supports TeX’s own font format and cannot use the TrueType or OpenType fonts installed on the system. However, XeLaTeX was written with that in mind; switching to that engine allows to specify any font available on the system.

Here are some tricks for scraping the web with R and Python.

I discuss the advantages of writing technical documents in plain text. And I give you resources to learn how to do it.

The title might give it away; this is my 500th blog post, the first having come some eight years ago. Very little online activity nowadays is excluded from measurement and so it is no surprise that this blog and another of my "other" scholarly endeavours, viz publishing in traditional journals, attract such "metrics" or statistics.

Derek Lowe has a recent post entitled " Another Funny-Looking Structure Comes Through ". He cites a recent medchem article[cite]10.1021/acsmedchemlett.5b00398[/cite] in which the following acetal sub-structure appears in a promising drug candidate (blue component below). His point is that orally taken drugs have to survive acid (green below) encountered in the stomach, and acetals are famously sensitive to hydrolysis (red below). But if

Soll HTML als Standard des offenen Web Kopierschutz unterstützen? Schon seit einiger Zeit wird darüber nicht nur in den Kreisen des Web-Gremiums W3C erbittert diskutiert. Genau genommen geht es um „Encrypted Media Extensions“ – Schnittstellen, über die kopiergeschützte Inhalte auch direkt im Browser abspielbar werden sollen. Netflix, Microsoft und Google haben dazu einen Entwurf vorgelegt.

In the two-publisher model I proposed a post or so back, I showed an example of how data can be incorporated (transcluded) into the story narrative of a scientific article, with both that story and the data each having their own independently citable reference (using a doi for the citation). Here I take it a step further, by publishing a functional procedure in a digital repository[cite]10.6084/m9.figshare.811862[/cite] and

Spam just doesn’t die. Every major mail provider has really good spam filters in place, as do the common mail clients. Nontheless, there seem to be enough people reading – and acting on – spam mail to make it a profitable business. No matter how much we hate it, we need to deal with spam. Better than having a good spam filter is not to be spammed in the first place.