Creating a Book with pandoc

One of my clients asked me for a printable book to accompany one of my workshops. My teaching style is more fluid and we write a lot of code in class. I wanted a quick way to take all the source code files and some images and make a book out of them.

Since I already work with markdown, I looked for a solution that can convert markdown to PDF. The winner was Pandoc (which can be installed with conda). Of course the out-of-the-box results weren't satisfactory and some tweaking was required. Mostly to make images appear where they are define in the markdown and not where pandoc/LaTex thinks is the optimal location.

The solution is composed of an awk script to add an include directive to markdown, a custom LaTex header to inline images and a Makefile to bind them all.

You can view the whole project here, including a example book. You can view the output here (decorators anyone?).

Installing Arch Linux on Laptop with UEFI

After some time with Xubuntu I decided to get back to Arch Linux.

Arch have a command line based installer, the installation instructions are pretty good but for a laptop with UEFI I had to do some extra steps. Here's what I came up with, hope you'll find it useful as well.

Most of my files are backed on "the cloud", my home directory with all the RC files is on a private git repository. Getting up and running after the initial install was pretty easy.