Johan Thelin's blog

Now and then, office-type documents need to be converted. The latex users have always been able to produce a variety of formats from the command line, but for the OpenOffice/LibreOffice users, manual labor has been the solution. That changes with unoconv. Now you can convert to most file formats directly from the command line. more>>

Booting a computer is always more complex than one wants to think. On the PC side, it looks as if BIOS finally is retired and replaced by EFI (I wonder which was the last OS to use BIOS for anything that just loading a secondary bootloader). On Mac, EFI has been around for a while. On embedded Linux systems, however, u-boot has been a big player for a long time. more>>

Amidst all the chaos surrounding the Qt project, the power of open source software has shown itself. The Romanian developer Bogdan Vatra has ported Qt to Android. To avoid trademark conflicts, the result was named Necessitas. more>>

There are some commands that turn out to be more useful than first meets the eye. In my opinion, xargs is one of those commands. It takes the standard input and uses it to build a command line. It's nothing fancy, but it's very handy in some situations. more>>

I recently spent some time getting one of my long term projects built. For quite some time I've had an old desktop computer serve as my printer server. As this machine is kind of loud, I've turned it off when not using it. This led to some client machines not appreciating the printer becoming available at the wrong time. more>>

I've been working as a freelancer for almost a year now, and I cannot help noticing how free software helps making this possible. Working in an international setting, most of the work is done from my home office. This requires techniques to get the work done. more>>

Looking through my home for Linux systems I just realized that it is everywhere. First of all, I find it on my computers - from servers to laptop. That is the obvious place though. I wonder, where else can I find Linux running? more>>

Free software may stem from a research mind-set, where shared results lead to a greater good. Free software has built this around various licenses such as GPL and BSD. The ideals behind free software have spread beyond software and can also be seen in other areas: documentation, game mods, illustrations, music - all types of content creation can be licensed in an open and free way. more>>

Living in Sweden, conferences usually include travelling abroad. This is all fun, but it also means spending time away from family and work. This in turn means catching up on work, i.e. spending even less time with the family. Not exactly what I want to do all my life. more>>