Balaji's Tech Notes

Another Why does upgrading Linux break so many things post. This time with my Home-lab which consists of 3 NUC’s 1 running Proxmox. The machines have been running Proxmox 5 until recently, when the company announced that support for Proxmox 5 was ending. With quite a bit of trepidation, I upgraded to Proxmox 6 and yet again the same problem as before - this time with the networking stack where the servers stopped picking up the fixed IP’s assigned to them from my router using MAC addresses. [Read More]

As I mentioned briefly in my earlier post on using Pandoc, one way to be able to use citations with pandoc is to use the zotxt extension with Zotero. The zotxt extension comes with an emacs integration as well zotxt-emacs, but I could not get it to work reliably. Instead after quite a bit of searching on GitHub, I came across this gist which works pretty reliably. Reproducing the Gist here for reference: [Read More]

While testing the Markdown files generated by pandoc in Hugo, I realized I had some duplicate content that was making the individual posts very difficult to read. After careful reading of the pandoc Manual I discovered to my sadness that there was no built-in way to remove the content I did not want 😉. The only option then was to write pandoc filters. Now pandoc has libraries that allow you to write filters in pretty much any modern language but out of the box, it supports filters written in Lua. [Read More]

More document manipulation tricks using pandoc! This time I’m using pandoc to change image paths in Markdown documents - very useful for example, when publishing Zettelkasten notes written in Markdown files to a blog. pandoc X:\path\to\source.md -f markdown ---standalone --resource-path= --resource-path=.;"X:\\path\\to\\parent\\folder\\\";"X:\\path\\to\\another\\folder\\" --extract-media=/img t markdown_mmd+yaml_metadata_block -o X:\path\to\content\posts\target.md" This will make pandoc search for linked images and place them in a folder named img using the file SHA as the filename. It will also change the link in the output markdown file to point to the new location - neat! [Read More]

The markdown-mode in Emacs does ship with a basic preview mode where it will show the Markdown content as HTML, but there are no CSS styles applied (naturally) and this makes it difficult to get a sense of how the page would render on GitHub. spacemacs ships with a extra function that renders the Markdown content in an Emacs window with GitHub formatting, but again this is without CSS styling. So let’s use pandoc instead! [Read More]

Not very surprisingly I think, given the Zettelkasten technique originated from an academic background a number of practitioners are from the same background and thus there is quite a lot of emphasis on citing the proper sources etc. I caught that bug as well if only in that I wanted a more reliable way to track articles I would use in my Zettelkasten than just Pinboard bookmarks. That lead me to Zotero and from there it was a one short fateful step to learning about pandoc. [Read More]

As part of my shift to plaintext based tools, I was looking for a good Markdown editor on iOS as well as an App that I could use to maintain a personal journal. For Markdown editing, I settled on 1Writer and for my journal I decided to use Notebooks. However, with both tools when I tried to connect them to my self-hosted OwnCloud instance I would get a “Method Not Allowed” error. [Read More]

Somewhere in parallel with my Emacs explorations, I came across the concept of Zettelkasten and I was instantly hooked. Much like GTD, Zettelkasten is a technique that’s “Easy to understand. Hard to apply” but my early experience with it has been very promising. One of the ongoing debates in the Zettelkasten community is around the question of backlinks - basically how should you maintain the inter-relationships between your notes that are the heart of a Zettelkasten system? [Read More]

Keypirinha is an awesome new keystroke launcher for Windows. Much better than Launchy or Keybreeze which I’ve used before. 1 The best part of Keypirinha for me is that the configuration is entirely driven by text files so it’s really easy to tweak it to your satisfaction. The one annoyance I’ve had so far is with the WinSCP plugin for Keypirinha. It turns out that the package only works with the default locations for WinSCP settings - either the Registry entry or a WinSCP. [Read More]