Karl Bartel @karlb@fosstodon.org

I really like the following rules regarding the use of ANSI colors in terminal applications:

* Avoid black and white, as they are used inconsistently.
* Never combine two colors or a bright color with foreground. Only combine regular/bright colors with background and maybe regular colors with foreground.

Source: http://tobib.spline.de/xi/posts/2019-06-24-terminal-colors/

That sounds like a great way to get readable output for different terminal configurations (e.g. no white text on a terminal with light background).

I have a website searching bilingual dictionaries, so the users already have to choose two languages. What is the best way to offer this service with different UI languages, without drowning the user in even more language selection dialogs?

I'm thinking about using the `Accept-Language` header for the default and allowing a language switch in a not too prominent position (e.g. footer) to set an override cookie. That would also mean leaving UI lang out of the URL.

Any recommendations?

I love the `sqlite-utils memory` command to modify, filter, group and join CSVs and convert between CSV, JSON and SQLite. And together with xlsx2csv I can even ingest Excel sheets easily.

#sqlite #sqlite-utils

Sometimes, the scientific notation is not a viable option. Here's how I like to format numbers that can be very small or very large in that case:

http://www.karl.berlin/formatting-numbers.html

What's your favorite way to do it?

I just improved the responsiveness of the #WikDict web interface, so you can enjoy your free translations more easily on your mobile device.

Before/after screenshots: http://blog.wikdict.com/2021/03/better-layout-on-mobile-devices.html

Try it yourself: https://www.wikdict.com/

And I took the opportunity to upgrade from Bootstrap 3 to Boostrap 5.

Look up translations on #gemini with #WikDict! More than 6.6 million translations across 20 languages are available
gemini://gmi.wikdict.com/

Source code at
https://github.com/karlb/wikdict-gemini

It's quite an early release, but if there is interest, I will improve on it.

How I brought my blog to #gemini without writing it twice:

gemini://gmi.karl.berlin/gemini-blog.gmi
http://www.karl.berlin/gemini-blog.html

I just noticed that #bitbucket did not archive my #mercurial repos in any visible way. I expected them to keep at least the repo discriptions up (which contained a link to the new git repo in my case). Instead, the repo links 404 and my account looks completely empty. Not the nicest way to handle such a change.

Old: https://web.archive.org/web/20161220165848/https://bitbucket.org/karlb/
New:
https://bitbucket.org/karlb/

After more than six year on Google #appengine, I finally moved my simple multiplayer auction game #landrush over to my local server.
http://landrush.karl.berlin/

I really liked the service back then, but the classic app engine only got worse over time and never got an update to python3, and the newer offerings never got as attractive as the classic app engine for me (no ndb, no spending limits, more complex). 😢

I always wanted my volume keys to change the volume logarithmically. Actually getting it was easier than expected:

pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ $(pacmd list-sinks | awk '/volume:/ {print int($3 * 1.2); exit}')

I just bound this to the volume up key via xbindkeys.

The more articles I see about supposedly simple blogging setups, the happier I am about my primitive setup described at http://www.karl.berlin/blog.html .

If anyone wants clearer instructions on how to use it yourself, let me know!

#Plato is a really nice reader application for #Kobo e-readers:
https://github.com/baskerville/plato

It can't fetch my pocket articles, but #wallabag can be used with it. I don't want to spend much time switching tools right now, but I will consider this at a later time.

I just updated #doagain, my todo list for recurring tasks. It fixes some display problems that accumulated over the last years and the code is updated to #elm 0.19.1.

Go to https://github.com/karlb/doagain for the readme and code or to http://static.karl.berlin/doagain/ to launch it right away.

Let me know what you think!

Get #WikDict's new offline dictionaries at https://www.wikdict.com/page/download !

It's a bit sad that Android does not have a built-in dictionary and iOS does not allow users to add custom dictionaries. How am I supposed to bring free dictionaries to the masses?

As part of #WikDict, I want to provide downloadable bilingual dictionaries. I'm not sure which formats I should provide, yet. Help me decide! What is your favorite offline dictionary software?