Nicely Displayed Tweets

quick tips,

While looking at how to get a tweet from Twitter nicely formatted, I tried all kinds of tools, web sites and tips. In my case, I wanted to put a nice screenshot of the tweet by Alex Yates into my DevOps lecture slides.

Sharing the tweet via e-mail seemed to be a possibility, but it did not look as nice as I expected.

It turned out, that Twitter provides functionality to nicely display Twitter URLs out of the box via https://publish.twitter.com.

All you have to do is to paste the Twitter link into the text box and everything ios nicely rendered for you.

Link: https://publish.twitter.com/#

Restore Pretzel Rocks Offscreen Window

hacks,

As you might now, I use Pretzel as the source for music during my streams. What you probably don’t know, for whatever reason, the player windows seem to disappear from time to time without any possibility to get it back on any of my screens.

Pretzl App Window as it should be

Actually, there is no way to get the window back on your screen(s). The easiest way to restore the default windows position is to jump into %APPDATA%/PretzelDesktop where you delete the window-state.json file.

This one has to go…

Make sure Pretzel is closed while deleting the JSON-file. Once you start Pretzel App again, it should reset its position.

Corona Neolinguism

irl,

This is something, probably only Germans understand: we now have a whole list of new words in German related to Corona.

Personally, I have not seen our language evolving that fast.

In der Berichterstattung über die Coronapandemie werden einige für den deutschen Allgemeinwortschatz neue Wörter sowie bekannte Wörter mit neuen Bedeutungen verwendet. Manche sind aus dem Englischen entlehnt, andere im Deutschen gebildet. Neben etwas älteren Lexemen stehen ganz neue, neben solchen aus bestimmten Fachsprachen solche, die außerhalb von Fachkontexten entstanden sind.

Neolinguismus Wörterbuch: https://www.owid.de/docs/neo/listen/corona.jsp

Emoji Font

hacks,

Occasionally (probably too often), I use emojis in my lecture notes. Unfortunately, sometimes I end up with strange things based on the font, I use.

OpenSansEmoji might help to solve this issue.

Example of OpenSansEmoji vs Arial

It is a font made of three other fonts, providing all most of the emojis you need.

This is basically a mashup font which consists of three fonts. The aim of OpenSansEmoji is to include the whole iOS (currently 6.1) Emoji set while keeping the file size as low as possible. Most of the symbols listed on the “Emoji” Wikipedia page are supported. All symbols are in monochrome.

Also, it is licensed under Apache 2.0 and therefore free to use.

Link: https://github.com/MorbZ/OpenSansEmoji

Tufte Style LaTeX

visualization, ,

You might have heard of Edward Tufte. As a pioneer in data visualization, he also spent quite some time in book designs.

There is a great LaTeX project on GitHub dealing with this special design of Tufte’s books.

Example Book from tufte-latex

If you are just new to LaTeX or simply did not used it for a long time with it like me, this getting started tutorial will help you to get everything in place.

GitHub project: https://github.com/Tufte-LaTeX/tufte-latex
GitHub pages: https://tufte-latex.github.io/tufte-latex/
Getting started with Tufte-LaTeX: https://ajtulloch.github.io/2012/getting-started-with-tufte-latex/

Shark Tracker

cool stuff,

Also, I barely swim in the Atlantic ocean, the Ocearch Shark/Turtle/Wahle/Dolphine and some other species Tracker shows you recent movements of individuals out of the above-mentioned species.

The probably coolest feature is the fact, the tracked animals are known by name and the fact…

…you can drill down into the travel activity (let’s ignore the GDPR for a moment) of each animal as well, keep a favourite list and so on.

Unfortunately, it looks like the data is not publicly available. I just think about some ideas of how to process the data and predict movements and so on using some nice algorithms. If you want to access the data, you need explicit permission to do so.