added some drafts, finished acrobat reader post

9 files changed, 269 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/drafts/dell-dock.html b/drafts/dell-dock.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5b2526f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/drafts/dell-dock.html
@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+<p class="description">
+  Here's the problem. I have a Dell Latitude E-series laptop running FreeBSD
+  12.1-RELEASE. I also have a Dell E-Port II docking station on my desk. I
+  wanted to be able to take my shut, sleeping laptop and plop it down on the
+  docking station, hit the dock power button, and have the laptop wake up and
+  switch over to all of the docking station peripherals. All of the USB devices
+  did this without any additional work. However, the ethernet hookup, external
+  monitor, and speakers all required some additional tinkering. This assumes
+  that you're already familiar with wired and wireless network interfaces on
+  FreeBSD!
+</p>
+
+<h2>Link Aggregation (Failover)</h2>
+
+<p>
+  FreeBSD doesn't magically swap from wireless to wired connections by default,
+  but there's an easy way to remedy this: link failover. I recommend reading the
+  <a href="https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/network-aggregation.html"
+    >FreeBSD handbook page on network aggregation</a
+  >
+  as it's where I found out how to do what I'm about to show you. Basically,
+  aggregation lets you bind two of your network interfaces together into a
+  single virtual interface. Failover lets your traffic continue moving as long
+  as one of the aggregated interfaces has is connected. The steps I had to
+  follow are as follows:
+</p>
+
+<ul>
+  <li>
+    Bind the wireless network interface to the MAC address of the wired
+    interface
+  </li>
+  <li>Create a lagg interface using the two network interfaces</li>
+  <li>Bind the lagg interface to an IP address, preferably with DHCP</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>All of this is configured in my <code>rc.conf</code>:</p>
+
+<pre><code>
+wlans_iwn0="wlan0" # <- wlan0 device should use the iwn driver
+ifconfig_wlan0="WPA" # <- wlan0 should use WPA (wpa_supplicant) to connect to wireless SSIDs
+create_args_wlan0="wlanaddr 5c:26:0a:06:c1:d6" # <- wlan0 MAC address is set to em0 device MAC address
+ifconfig_em0="up" # <- enable em0 (ethernet) device
+cloned_interfaces="lagg0" # <- create cloned interface lagg0
+ifconfig_lagg0="up laggproto failover laggport em0 laggport wlan0 DHCP" # <- configure lagg0 interface to act as a failover lagg protocol over em0 and wlan0
+</code></pre>
+
+<p>
+  In practice, the preferred device is <code>em0</code>, or my ethernet NIC.
+  FreeBSD will always try to use that first. If it's disconnected, such as when
+  the laptop is removed from the dock, the wireless device (<code>wlan0</code>)
+  will take over. This transition happens instantly, and without interrupting
+  traffic; active transactions aren't cut short for example.
+</p>
diff --git a/drafts/my home server after b/drafts/home server evolution
index e69de29..e69de29 100644
--- a/drafts/my home server after
+++ b/drafts/home server evolution
diff --git a/drafts/my home server before b/drafts/my home server before
deleted file mode 100644
index e69de29..0000000
--- a/drafts/my home server before
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/drafts/programs i use all the time.html b/drafts/programs i use all the time.html
index b679d4d..fe7e63c 100644
--- a/drafts/programs i use all the time.html
+++ b/drafts/programs i use all the time.html
@@ -37,4 +37,5 @@
   <li>vim</li>
   <li>tmux</li>
   <li>mixer, mixertui</li>
+  <li>picom</li>
 </ul>
diff --git a/drafts/what is a script no really.html b/drafts/what is a script no really.html
index e69de29..9d97844 100644
--- a/drafts/what is a script no really.html
+++ b/drafts/what is a script no really.html
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+glues programs together
diff --git a/drafts/why does everyone insist on using adobe acrobat?.html b/drafts/why does everyone insist on using adobe acrobat?.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c2a5504
--- /dev/null
+++ b/drafts/why does everyone insist on using adobe acrobat?.html
@@ -0,0 +1,69 @@
+<h1>Why Does Everyone Use Adobe Acrobat [Reader]?</h1>
+
+<p>
+  This is something that I've never been able to figure out. All through high
+  school I had to use PDFs. And if you wanted to open a PDF, everyone understood
+  that you needed Adobe Acrobat Reader. Even web sites where you downloaded PDFs
+  insisted that in order to open them, you were going to have to follow a
+  download link to make sure you have Acrobat on your PC.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+  Fast-forward a few years into college and I'm using PDFs more than ever. Every
+  professor ever is scanning and uploading course material, so out comes Acrobat
+  Reader for literally every teacher and student. At this point I was actually
+  used to using Firefox (PDF.js) to view PDFs for a couple of reasons. First of
+  all, Firefox usually opened PDFs faster than Acrobat Reader did. Reader was
+  getting bigger with every release, and eventually had a monstrous UI to load
+  up every time I wanted to open a tiny PDF file. Second, Firefox had smooth
+  scrolling for page-width documents. Reader was getting slower and laggier with
+  each release, to the point where scrolling through a PDF was no longer buttery
+  smooth but jittery and stuttery. It also seemed like Reader purposefully
+  wouldn't slide the page when you used a mouse wheel. It would jump down a few
+  lines at a time like it was simulating the down arrow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+  By my senior year I had switched from Windows to Linux full-time and it was
+  then I found out about <a href="https://mupdf.com/">MuPDF</a> and from then on
+  things were never the same. It's literally the best PDF reader I've ever used,
+  and I tried out quite a few. There are desktop and mobile apps. It opens
+  almost instantly. It lets you easily resize the page with excellent keyboard
+  shortcuts. There are no giant menu bars on either side of the page to squish
+  the document down to an unreadable size. Having a dozen of them open at once
+  doesn't bog down my PC. It's also available for all of the relevant operating
+  systems I've used (Windows, Mac OS, Linux, FreeBSD)! Oh and password-protected
+  PDFs are supported as well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+  It's a fantastic piece of software And the best part is it comes with a
+  variety of tools to edit and manipulate PDFs as well. If the folks I went to
+  school with thought you needed the free Acrobat Reader to view a PDF, they
+  sure as heck thought you needed to buy Acrobat Pro to edit one. Some of them
+  refused to pay for it and used a variety of online services to upload, split
+  or merge, and download PDFs. I honestly for the life of me can't understand
+  why. MuPDF comes with <code>mutool</code>, which does all of the things I
+  would ever need to do with a PDF. It can attempt to convert a PDF to other
+  formats, like HTML. It can split and combine documents. It can even create
+  them from scratch and sign them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+  It's also free and open source. Can you imagine that? PDF viewing and editing
+  being free and open source? It's AGPL (in addition to being commercially)
+  licensed by the creators. The only slight drawback is the desktop version
+  apparently does not yet let you fill out forms. Not sure why but this isn't
+  something I use very frequently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+  It's not the hottest piece of tech out there, but it just plain works and
+  works really well. Maybe the only reason more people I know don't use it is
+  because Adobe is synonymous with the PDF format. It doesn't seem like that big
+  of a deal, but I feel like Acrobat has always been a piece of software that
+  has frustrated new or infrequent users in computing. And that's just not good.
+  Maybe the barrier to using MuPDF is the lack of GUI and abundance of
+  keybindings, but for me that's no sweat. I'd say to anyone to just try it out
+  and see if they like it. It is free, after all.
+</p>
diff --git a/index.html b/index.html
index 597664c..84729c5 100644
--- a/index.html
+++ b/index.html
@@ -64,6 +64,7 @@
       </h1>
 
       <ul id="index">
+<li> <a href="/posts/computing/2020-12-22-why-does-everyone-use-adobe-acrobat-reader.html">Why Does Everyone Use Adobe Acrobat [Reader]? <code>Tue, 22 Dec 2020</code> </a> </li>
 <li> <a href="/posts/programming/2020-12-08-useful-sprint-planning-from-a-certified-scrum-master.html">Useful Sprint Planning from a Certified Scrum Master <code>Tue, 08 Dec 2020</code> </a> </li>
 <li> <a href="/posts/programming/2020-12-04-aoc-2020-day-1-in-cbm-basic.html">AOC 2020 Day 1 in CBM Basic <code>Fri, 04 Dec 2020</code> </a> </li>
 <li> <a href="/posts/programming/2020-12-01-the-guides.html">The Guides <code>Tue, 01 Dec 2020</code> </a> </li>
diff --git a/posts/computing/2020-12-22-why-does-everyone-use-adobe-acrobat-reader.html b/posts/computing/2020-12-22-why-does-everyone-use-adobe-acrobat-reader.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..06419b5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/posts/computing/2020-12-22-why-does-everyone-use-adobe-acrobat-reader.html
@@ -0,0 +1,142 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html>
+  <head>
+    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/includes/stylesheet.css" />
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+    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
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+      content="The World Wide Web pages of Adam Carpenter"
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+    />
+    <meta property="og:site_name" content="53hor.net" />
+    <meta
+      property="og:title"
+      content="Why Does Everyone Use Adobe Acrobat [Reader]?"
+    />
+    <meta property="og:type" content="website" />
+    <meta property="og:url" content="https://www.53hor.net" />
+    <title>53hornet ➙ Why Does Everyone Use Adobe Acrobat [Reader]?</title>
+  </head>
+
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+    <nav>
+      <ul>
+        <li>
+          <a href="/">
+            <img src="/includes/icons/home-roof.svg" />
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+            <img src="/includes/icons/information-variant.svg" />
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+        </li>
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+          <a href="https://git.53hor.net">
+            <img src="/includes/icons/git.svg" />
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+          <a href="/hosted.html">
+            <img src="/includes/icons/desktop-tower.svg" />
+            Hosted
+          </a>
+        </li>
+        <li>
+          <a type="application/rss+xml" href="/rss.xml">
+            <img src="/includes/icons/rss.svg" />
+            RSS
+          </a>
+        </li>
+      </ul>
+    </nav>
+
+    <article>
+      <h1>Why Does Everyone Use Adobe Acrobat [Reader]?</h1>
+
+      <p>
+        <img src="https://nextcloud.53hor.net/s/688ztNiSAri3eDN/preview" />
+      </p>
+
+      <p>
+        This is something that I've never been able to figure out. All through
+        high school I had to use PDFs. And if you wanted to open a PDF, everyone
+        understood that you needed Adobe Acrobat Reader. Even web sites where
+        you downloaded PDFs insisted that in order to open them, you were going
+        to have to follow a download link to make sure you have Acrobat on your
+        PC.
+      </p>
+
+      <p>
+        Fast-forward a few years into college and I'm using PDFs more than ever.
+        Every professor ever is scanning and uploading course material, so out
+        comes Acrobat Reader for literally every teacher and student. At this
+        point I was actually used to using Firefox (PDF.js) to view PDFs for a
+        couple of reasons. First of all, Firefox usually opened PDFs faster than
+        Acrobat Reader did. Reader was getting bigger with every release, and
+        eventually had a monstrous UI to load up every time I wanted to open a
+        tiny PDF file. Second, Firefox had smooth scrolling for page-width
+        documents. Reader was getting slower and laggier with each release, to
+        the point where scrolling through a PDF was no longer buttery smooth but
+        jittery and stuttery. It also seemed like Reader purposefully wouldn't
+        slide the page when you used a mouse wheel. It would jump down a few
+        lines at a time like it was simulating the down arrow.
+      </p>
+
+      <p>
+        By my senior year I had switched from Windows to Linux full-time and it
+        was then I found out about <a href="https://mupdf.com/">MuPDF</a> and
+        from then on things were never the same. It's literally the best PDF
+        reader I've ever used, and I tried out quite a few. There are desktop
+        and mobile apps. It opens almost instantly. It lets you easily resize
+        the page with excellent keyboard shortcuts. There are no giant menu bars
+        on either side of the page to squish the document down to an unreadable
+        size. Having a dozen of them open at once doesn't bog down my PC. It's
+        also available for all of the relevant operating systems I've used
+        (Windows, Mac OS, Linux, FreeBSD)! Oh and password-protected PDFs are
+        supported as well.
+      </p>
+
+      <p>
+        It's a fantastic piece of software And the best part is it comes with a
+        variety of tools to edit and manipulate PDFs as well. If the folks I
+        went to school with thought you needed the free Acrobat Reader to view a
+        PDF, they sure as heck thought you needed to buy Acrobat Pro to edit
+        one. Some of them refused to pay for it and used a variety of online
+        services to upload, split or merge, and download PDFs. I honestly for
+        the life of me can't understand why. MuPDF comes with
+        <code>mutool</code>, which does all of the things I would ever need to
+        do with a PDF. It can attempt to convert a PDF to other formats, like
+        HTML. It can split and combine documents. It can even create them from
+        scratch and sign them.
+      </p>
+
+      <p>
+        It's also free and open source. Can you imagine that? PDF viewing and
+        editing being free and open source? It's AGPL (in addition to being
+        commercially) licensed by the creators. The only slight drawback is the
+        desktop version apparently does not yet let you fill out forms. Not sure
+        why but this isn't something I use very frequently.
+      </p>
+
+      <p>
+        It's not the hottest piece of tech out there, but it just plain works
+        and works really well. Maybe the only reason more people I know don't
+        use it is because Adobe is synonymous with the PDF format. It doesn't
+        seem like that big of a deal, but I feel like Acrobat has always been a
+        piece of software that has frustrated new or infrequent users in
+        computing. And that's just not good. Maybe the barrier to using MuPDF is
+        the lack of GUI and abundance of keybindings, but for me that's no
+        sweat. I'd say to anyone to just try it out and see if they like it. It
+        is free, after all.
+      </p>
+    </article>
+  </body>
+</html>
diff --git a/rss.xml b/rss.xml
index b8a8018..5b3d395 100644
--- a/rss.xml
+++ b/rss.xml
@@ -19,4 +19,5 @@
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 <item> <title>AOC 2020 Day 1 in CBM Basic</title> <pubDate>Fri, 04 Dec 2020</pubDate> <link>https://www.53hor.net/posts/programming/2020-12-04-aoc-2020-day-1-in-cbm-basic.html</link> <guid>https://www.53hor.net/posts/programming/2020-12-04-aoc-2020-day-1-in-cbm-basic.html</guid> </item>
 <item> <title>Useful Sprint Planning from a Certified Scrum Master</title> <pubDate>Tue, 08 Dec 2020</pubDate> <link>https://www.53hor.net/posts/programming/2020-12-08-useful-sprint-planning-from-a-certified-scrum-master.html</link> <guid>https://www.53hor.net/posts/programming/2020-12-08-useful-sprint-planning-from-a-certified-scrum-master.html</guid> </item>
+<item> <title>Why Does Everyone Use Adobe Acrobat [Reader]?</title> <pubDate>Tue, 22 Dec 2020</pubDate> <link>https://www.53hor.net/posts/computing/2020-12-22-why-does-everyone-use-adobe-acrobat-reader.html</link> <guid>https://www.53hor.net/posts/computing/2020-12-22-why-does-everyone-use-adobe-acrobat-[reader]?.html</guid> </item>
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