Digital Workflow

After concluding that it is not viable to use institutional person pages to build a “Who’s Who” directory for MishMash, I yesterday found that NVA can be a good solution. However, it would only cover affiliated (Norwegian) researchers, which may be too restrictive for MishMash, where we also want to list non-academic, non-affiliated, and international researchers. Then, ORCID may be a better solution. This is an international registry where researchers can register themselves (check my ORCID profile). However, what information is available there and how can it be retrieved? ...

I have seen that it is possible to build a complete CV from NVA data, the Norwegian research registry. As part of my quest to collect data of researchers connected to MishMash, I am looking for the best data source(s). Starting with a quick check of my own personal page at UiO, showed that institutional person pages are not the right solution. But what about NVA? Perhaps that is a viable solution? ...

The Open Graph standard has helped “automagically” collect information about partner events on MishMash.no. Now, we have started building a “who’s who” directory, and I have begun looking into how we can pre-populate pages from existing academic identity sources rather than asking everyone to fill out web forms. My first inclination was to look at what is available on institutional websites. Most researchers have at least one institutional personal website. In this blog post, I look at what can be retrieved from my UiO page. ...

While preparing for a concert yesterday, I needed to copy a bunch of scores (in PDF format) over to a pad. They were all from different sources, and some had been scanned upside down. They looked fine on my computer, so I couldn’t understand why they ended up being shown upside down on my pad. After some investigation, I realized that it was because the rotation was written into the metadata of the file. This worked fine on my laptop but not in the score reader program on my pad. If you want a file to be truly rotated by 180 degrees, you should rotate and then flatten that rotation so the orientation is baked into the PDF. ...

A little while ago, I wrote about how to prepare a document for multi-page printing using the terminal. Today, I had to find a solution for printing a PDF in “booklet” mode, meaning that pages are printed so that, after folding the printed sheets in half and nesting them, the page order reads correctly. On Linux (Ubuntu), I use the pdfbook2 command — a wrapper around pdfjam that reorders pages for booklets. See the pdfjam documentation on CTAN (https://ctan.org/pkg/pdfjam) and the TeX Live distribution (https://tug.org/texlive/) for installation; on Debian/Ubuntu it’s usually available via the texlive-extra-utils package (https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=texlive-extra-utils). ...

It feels somewhat old-school to write a blog post about printing, but this is mainly a note-to-self and a reminder for others who want to print a poster with an A4 printer. I don’t print very often, but I had to print an A2-sized poster from home, where I only have an A4 printer. I couldn’t find any options to print across multiple pages in the Ubuntu printer dialogue. Testing on a Windows computer didn’t help either. But of course, there are terminal solutions. ...

While writing the blog post on AI-realistic photos, I wanted to include one of my 360-degree photos. In the past, I have done this by embedding code snippets from commercial services. However, those tend to disappear or move, so I wanted to check (again) if I can do it natively on my own server instead. And, lo and behold, now, in 2025, it is finally possible to do this easily with regular web tools! ...

In this post I write about how it is possible rename all the photos in a folder based on the date and time information stored in the file. I mainly take photos with my mobile phone these days (a Samsung Galaxy Ultra S23) but occasionnaly also use “regular” cameras. As opposed to my phone, which saves the files with a filename that includes date and time (YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.jpg), these cameras typically just use some random name (e.g. P43435.jpg). This is impractical when combining photos from several cameras, so I prefer renaming the files with the same filename schema. ...

Yesterday, I wrote about why I don’t like MS Teams. My frustration about this Microsoft product (or perhaps better, platform*) could have been directed at most other commercial platforms. Common to all is the attempt to lock users into a software ecosystem that they cannot easily escape without losing their information. But what is the option? Over the years, I have developed my own workflows, including practical strategies for handling files and folders. That will have to wait for another post. Here, I will focus on two old-school communication platforms that are still going strong: SMS and e-mail. ...

We have MS Teams at the University of Oslo (as in many other places), and it is increasingly used by administrative staff. Some academics use it as well, but less so in my experience. I use it when other people force me to, but I would never force others to use it. In this blog post, I explain why. No Linux support I have been using exclusively Linux-based operating systems for more than ten years. This includes Android-based phones and tablets and laptops running Ubuntu. This is partly an ideological choice, supporting Free and open-source software (FOSS). However, I would never have done it if I hadn’t experienced Linux-based products being more reliable, trustworthy, and (to me) easier to use. ...