Creating PDF forms with LaTeX

Posted on Sun 11 July 2021 in latex • 4 min read

Update 2023: While this all works in principle, I encountered too many PDF viewers where some form elements where doing unexpected things. The current approach is to only print visual form elements and make the form fillable with some PDF authoring software.

A few weeks ago I thought it would …


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Collection of useful links for LaTeX

Posted on Mon 30 November 2020 in latex • 1 min read

As I sometimes come around some useful links which just go missing again I will collect them here:

to be continued...


Homeautomation using Home Assistant

Posted on Fri 16 October 2020 in misc • 3 min read

Early in the summer we had the idea to change the lights on our back porch from various switches inside the garage to something one could control without going anywhere. As I had an old RaspberryPi lying around I ordered a small relay board and installed domoticz to switch the …


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Show the current music credits in the XFCE Panel

Posted on Fri 02 October 2020 in linux • 2 min read

I usually listen to music while working and every once in a while I ask myself what the current track might be. I could switch to my music player or have a look in the sound control plugin of the XFCE panel, but that involves clicking or moving the focus …


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Various useful PDF manipulation commands

Posted on Thu 20 February 2020 in linux • 2 min read

Merging and rotating PDFs

Merging PDFs can be easily done with pdftk. You can also use this tool to select only specific pages from your document or rotate pages. This is my go-to tool if I don't have to manipulate pages beyond rotation.

To concatenate all PDFs in the working …


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Some notes on using digiKam as a photo manager

Posted on Wed 08 March 2017 in misc • 1 min read

Digikam is a very powerful and complex software to manage photos. I was using shotwell previously for quite some time, but it's capabilities are limited. Wherever you go, digiKam is recommended instead.

The best things in digiKam so far are hierarchical tags and automatic face detection. But on the other …


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Automatically adding a transparent background with ImageMagick

Posted on Wed 18 January 2017 in misc • 1 min read

Yesterday I had to convert some JPEG images with a white background into a PNG with a transparent background. While it is possible to do this by just replacing white with transparent, this also replaces white in other parts of the image where this is not intended. So the better …


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Download files using Python 3

Posted on Wed 18 January 2017 in python • 1 min read

To download files accessible over HTTP(S) where you are generating their URLs with Python 3, saving can be done with

from urllib.request import urlretrieve
urlretrieve(url, local_filename)

Save your Pelican posts as a draft

Posted on Wed 18 January 2017 in misc • 1 min read

Just as a reminder: Adding status: draft to the header of a pelican source written in Markdown sets the draft mode.

(From the pelican docs)


Commonly needed OpenSSL commands

Posted on Fri 06 January 2017 in linux • 1 min read

Very handy list of needed commands: https://www.sslshopper.com/article-most-common-openssl-commands.html

This is especially useful if you hve to check details of a certificate, but also to check which certificate is serverd on non HTTP protocols.