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If you have visited this page in the past, you might’ve noticed some hiccups over the past weeks. The reason is that the CMS which runs this site has been completely locked up, so I searched for an alternative, which I found, only to be pointed towards a fork of that very CMS which remains Open Source a few days later. In this article, I give you a small update of what happened, why it happened, and I also go over a few changes and additions to the site itself.
Writer’s Block
This week’s article is about a sudden realisation I had this week: Writer’s block. We’ve all had our share of writer’s block, and there are plenty of articles out there. I’m not going to tell you how to get out of it in very much detail, since — as I said — there’s already a lot of good and valuable info out there. Rather, I’m gonna reflect upon the kind of writer’s block I had and why I strongly suspect that writer’s block necessarily correlates with the amount of text you write.
Postmortem: Zettlr’s first Security Incident
Today is the day: I publish the first post-mortem that I had to write up. Having developed my app Zettlr for the past four years, I knew I'm not safe from security issues, and last Thursday, it was time: I received a mail containing a security related disclosure concerning a huge hole in the safety of Zettlr. I have posted this Postmortem also on the Zettlr blog, but I wanted to share it with you here as well. The reason? Don't be such an idiot as I was.
How I work, Part VII: E-Mails
Today is finally the day I continue my series on "How I work." After a few digressions, I focus on our habit of mailing, not so much because I want to advocate for a specific program, but rather because I would like to advocate against a practice I see well too often. The TL;DR this week is short: Don't use webmailers; except if you have to.
Goodbye, October
For the better part of the last decade, I built all my websites using October CMS. However, due to a change in their policy, that won't work anymore. So I need to migrate all my pages to a new system. After some fiddling around, I settled with Jekyll. In this post I just want to quickly summarise the why, the how, and the next steps.
Research Ethics, or: How to get your University banned for Life
This week, I’m breaking the streak of my “How I Work” series, since something has come up that bugs me quite a lot. On Wednesday one of the maintainers of the Linux Kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman, dropped a tweet that might seem like everyday banter. Upon closer look, however, it is all but normal business: It shows such a blatant violation of research ethics that I have to comment on that.
How I work, Part VI: Terminals and DIY Automation
With part 6 of the series on How I Work, we’re entering smaller and smaller apps. Although the big hubs of my digital work environment are Zotero, Zettlr, and VS Code, these small apps all play a vital role in easing my workload to a high degree. Efficient helper apps can never be underestimated, so I’ll gradually introduce these in the next parts of this series! My terminal makes the start since it’s a multi-purpose app that can do quite a lot of heavy lifting for me. Even if you don’t do any programming yourself, you can profit from using a terminal. So continue reading why you should start using a terminal!
How I work, Part V: Zettlr and Academic Markdown
Some of you who are following me mainly via the project’s official Twitter account might have waited for this piece on Zettlr. But all of you who don’t know me will also find today’s part of my How I work-series interesting: Because it’s all about leaving your comfort zone of Word and entering a world that is still in flux, but nevertheless more powerful than anything before it. So read on to see why I think Markdown, and not Word Processors, will mark the future of academic writing!
How I work, Part IV: Reference Management & Reading Literature
Today’s article of my series on how I work deals with my reference management. As you can see, we’re closing in on the “big” app Zettlr, which is my central hub for writing. However, even before I write any sentence, it’s important to read something and sort that into a decent reference manager. Mine is Zotero, and in this article I want to shed light upon why it’s almost without any alternative, and how I use it to read many papers in a short amount of time – and also, why I neglect many features of Zotero.
How I work, Part III: Data Science and Programming
Some of you might’ve expected that the second-most used app on my computer is Zettlr. However, two reasons prevent me from introducing it just now: For one, I’m still in the middle of having ripped it apart, so that I don’t feel I can write about it, since many features are currently creeping into the app. But secondly, Zettlr isn’t actually the most-used app right now. Since I’m coming freshly from a course on Natural Language Processing (NLP), the most used app right now is my code editor. Enter Visual Studio Code.