Productivity

To not get surprised by an upcoming deadline the day before, I like having them in sight regularly. The solution for me is to have in the upper right corner of my computer screen at all time. I am using Gnome, but this approach works for macOS. It is possible to develop for the Gnome shell directly, but this requires interaction with some complex and poorly documented APIs. For simply counting down numbers in the top bar this seems overkill.

I created a flask server to create podcast feeds for KIT Opencast on demand. Even though the opencast software has a feature for RSS-Feeds the KIT has not activated this feature. Therefor you can run the flask server to provide a podcast feeds for you. Feel free to host this. I don’t want to commit to hosting it permanently. I provide this software for free use under MIT license. Note that this license of course does not apply to the obtained content.

This blog post is a collection of useful (linux) tools for PDFs, like slides or problem sheets at university. For every use case I give one example that should make the usage clear. Make sure to have the tools installed. Concatenate two or more PDFs: gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=combine.pdf -dBATCH 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf n.pdf Concatenate all PDFs in one folder. gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=combine.pdf -dBATCH *.pdf > /dev/null JPEGs to pdf.

The online learning platform ilias is used at a number of universities including the KIT. Oftentimes assignments for lectures are distributed to the students by uploading them into a specific folder in the illias course. At least I think it is quite annoying to regularly check for new assignments: Logging in, navigating to the course and check if something has changed. I solved this problem by discovering the rss feed of ilias.