In one of my previous posts Note Taking for Minimalists we argued about the importance to keep full control over all the tools we take personal notes with. In this approach personal notes are simple text files, that live in the filesystem next to other resources they refer to. As (note) files are identified by their filename, special care needs to be taken to ensure that the files are named consistently e.g. using so called sort tags, that specify their sequence or chronological order when listed. Secondly, the filename must reflect the content description (meta data) of a note. This is where the note taking tool Tp-Note comes into play: it takes care, that the filename of a note exposes the note's meta data. Technically, Tp-Note reads the YAML header of the note file - in particular the title field - and corrects the filename of the note, if does not comply with some synchronization rule. From it's first version on Tp-Note was able to synchronize the note's meta data and filename unidirectionally. With Tp-Note version 1.16 comes a new feature: bidirectional filename synchronization. This new feature allows you to add automatically YAML header to any existing text file. Used in scripts you can convert your random text file collection into ordered note files with meta data.

EurKEY - The European Keyboard Layout is based on the American keyboard layout. It is well suited for translators and programmers who are used to the US keyboard layout. It has has a very convenient access to European letters and accents.

This note explains how to install the latest version 1.3 on Windows. For Linux instructions please refer to: Install the international US keyboard layout with the European EurKEY extension on Linux.

This short note shows how to install the software driver for the Validity Sensors, Inc. VFS7500 Touch Fingerprint Sensor which can be found in Lenovo's T460s, T470s and many other laptops.

In one of my previous blog posts I introduced the concept of minimalist note taking as a note taking method and life style, that tries to improve informational self-determination by restricting oneself to a fully controlled hard and software environment. The presented method solely relies one some UTF-8 text editor application and optionally on a template system like Tp-Note. This note explains how to configure Tp-Note for Neovim. In the following I presume, that you know about Neovim's qualities already, so I will rather focus on the technical details about how to integrate the template system Tp-Note with Neovim.

This short note shows how to generate Vim's spell file format from the .aff and .dic files that Myspell uses. Myspell is distributed, inter alia, with OpenOffice.org and many Mozilla products. The OpenOffice .oxt files are zip packed archives containing Myspells's .aff and .dic dictionary files. As the Estonian spell file can not yet be downloaded automatically, we will go through the manual compilation and installation of the Estonian spell checker language file.