City Council Preview: March 2016

Hello, friends. We’ve crawled out of post-budget recuperation to bring you this guide to the next City Council meeting. On this month’s agenda: SmartTrack, the East Gardiner, bees, tennis, ca$h for gold, Black Lives Matter, and more.

Read more at Torontoist…

The GTK+ Compose Key…for Windows

So last year I got a netbook with rather poor Linux support. I finally got elementary OS working on it (a blog post in itself), but for the past several months I was using Windows alone. And it was terrible, for many reasons.

  1. It looks like ass.
  2. Mobile and desktop elements are mashed together awkwardly and it just doesn’t work. A desktop user should never see a message telling them to “swipe down” to continue shutdown. Jesus.
  3. Literally every software download site is super dodgy.
  4. The default user is administrator by default??? No wonder people get viruses!
  5. No fucking compose key! Continue reading The GTK+ Compose Key…for Windows

City Council Preview: February 2016

Friends, we can all agree that the municipal budget is the most exciting part of the year. But don’t get distracted—there’s a regular City Council meeting this month, too. On the agenda: Uber, fireworks, Toronto Hydro, subways, animal control, and even some good old-fashioned Rob Ford drama.

Let’s check it out, and understand the agenda better than those 15 councillors who never raise their hand in class.

Read more at Torontoist…

Theme: Markdown for Notepad++

A few months ago I got a new computer that has hardware with little Linux support, and so while waiting for someone to make a sound driver, I’ve been using Windows 10. I tried a lot of text editors, even building Gedit from source, before settling on Notepad++.

Notepad++ has built-in syntax highlighting for a lot of languages, but not Markdown. You can make your own “user-defined language”, and several people have created ones for Markdown, but I wasn’t really satisfied with any of them. So I made my own, which you can check out on Github. Due to the limitations of user-defined languages, some Markdown features can’t be implemented (e. g., asterisks as bullets, three spaces to create code blocks, etc.), but it should be good enough for everyday use. Please try it out, and adapt it for your own use!

How City Council Procedure Works

Tuning in to City Council for the first time—or even watching in person? You may feel lost and confused. Once you understand how council procedure works, you may still feel lost and confused, but at least you’ll know what’s going on.

Read more at Torontoist…