Productivity

To avoid being surprised by a deadline the day before it arrives, I like to keep upcoming deadlines visible. My solution is to display them in the upper right corner of my computer screen at all times. I use GNOME, but the same idea also works on macOS. It is possible to develop an extension for GNOME Shell directly, but this requires working with some complex and poorly documented APIs. Writing an extension just to display a countdown in the top bar seems like overkill. Luckily, Argos has me covered and simplifies this task enormously. On macOS, xbar provides similar functionality, though the paths and setup differ. Argos is a GNOME Shell extension for creating simple text displays and shortcuts in the top bar. To display text, all I have to do is create an executable that writes to stdout. I opted for a Python script, but shell scripts, C programs, and other executables work just as well. The script should calculate the number of days remaining until each deadline. Easy, right? Right?

I created a flask server to create podcast feeds for KIT Opencast on demand.

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.

The online learning platform Ilias is used at a number of universities including the KIT.