PGF/TikZ is able to produce really eye-candy mind maps (see example). However it might be impractical to create the TikZ structure for larger amount of nodes.

I’ve written a small C program that creates a PGF/TikZ LaTeX file out of a VYM (View Your Mind) XML export. So far this tool has only very basic functionality. Neither it handles UTF-8 explicitly, nor XLinks. Also it doesn’t add any alignment code to the LaTeX file yet, so you have to do some manual editing.

Download

• Vym2TikZ source tbz2 (2.4 KiB, 2008/08/01, cc-by-nc-sa, requires libxml2)
• Vym2TikZ c source code only (5.0 KiB, 2008/08/01, cc-by-nc-sa, requires libxml2)
• Vym2TikZ binary (3.1 KiB, Linux, 2008/08/01, IA32, dynamically linked against libxml2, compiled under Ubuntu 8.04)

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The Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich (LMU) offers free access to lots of journals. If you want to use this service from outside the university network, you have to use the DocumentWeb. This services is a kind of a proxy provided by the LRZ (computing center).

All you have to do is to Drag And Drop this button: to you Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar. Lets say you visit the page http://prola.aps.org/ and want to view certain publications. Just click on you new bookmark and you’ll (hopefully) will be redirected to the corresponding DocWeb-proxy page. That’s all. You will need to enter your MyTum account info once per session (user: YourName@mytum.de, password: YourPassword).

Libiap is a set of Gnuplot (>=4.2) scripts to provide a simple library to handle mouse input in Gnuplot. So far interactive fitting of a sum of several Lorentzian curves to some data has been implemented. But it can be easily adopted to fit e.g. Gaussians, exponential decay, etc.

Interactive fitting is fitting a set of data by supplying the initial guess values just by clicking on the plot. You also can use libiap for completely different tasks in your own scripts. Just Have a look at the demonstration program of libiap…

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The purpose of this script was to aid creating “rotating” brushes with Gimp. I often use them to create “stamp” brushes (e.g. grunge brushes) without every stamp looking the same. But the script of course can also be to create real rotating brushes like clocks, arrows, logos, whatever. And, yes, you also can create rotating GIFs very easily this way. Just save as a *.gif.

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I was looking for a way to change the volume using the multimedia keys on my keyboard. There are quite a few programms that should do the job, but all of them where running as a daemon (background process). In my opinion this is unneccesary because I need to raise/lower/mute the volume only once in a while. Therefore I wrote a quick’n'dirty bash script using ALSA’s amixer and the osd_cat utility.

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