Pi Hole is awesome for blocking ads on all devices on your local network, but sometimes it gets in the way. Sure, you can log in and disable it temporarily, but for some people that’s too much work. Thankfully, updates in the newest version of Pi Hole allow you to turn it off for specific devices. For example, I’ve disabled blocking on one phone in my house so it can freely click on tracker links and avoid getting blocked by those annoying websites with ad-block detectors.

For the past two semesters I have been using Discourse for my class discussion board. I started using it mainly due to the restricted nature of Canvas’s built-in discussion boards, which are terribly designed for actual discussion. Using Discourse, I’m able to have real conversations with my class, and my students are encouraged to interact with each other.

About 2 years into grad school I began to realize the importance of paying for the things that you love. So many of the apps and services that I used offered a free tier that I used and abused as much as possible because I was a student with very little extra money to spend. A probably embarrassing amount of time was spent looking for free alternatives to the things I really wanted to use. I preferred Zotero over EndNote, I used R instead of SPSS, and I endlessly waffled between Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive depending on who was offering the most free GBs. But I also found that many of the things I loved disappeared because they didn’t find a way to support themselves. Several online services that I enjoyed, like Turntable.fm, disappeared because they could not create the revenue they needed to continue operation. And as a perpetual mooch, I was a part of the problem. So I resolved that, when I could, I would support the applications that I loved to use, because I want them to stick around.

Man, it’s been a while. With the craziness of first trying to finish a dissertation in time, then trying to defend that dissertation, then packing and moving half-way across the country, then staring a new job, teaching a class (I’ve taught it before, but I’m trying to make it more awesome), and all that those entail, I haven’t even had time to think about the blog. Add to that the complication that I ended up removing my Linux server VM from my computer when I screwed something up horribly and had to reinstall. That broke my Octopress deployment process, so for a while there I didn’t even know how to update my blog, even if I’d had time to do it.

A recently published article in PLoS ONE, entitled “An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development” (link here) lit the world on fire. Okay, not really. In fact, most people, including researchers and even LaTeX enthusiasts have probably not read it. And that’s fine. Because it’s not very good. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.