National Carbon Price in Canada: give private industry entrepreneurs the clarity they crave

With the Trudeau government already struggling to keep up with its numerous promises, many environmentalists will follow the Green Party’s Elizabeth May and decry the Liberal…

C Barrington-Leigh

Jun 23, 2016

Ubuntu on Lenovo Thinkpad T450s

Lenovo’s T450s is another piece of high-production-volume hardware from a vendor with a fairly good reputation for Linux support … but a host of serious problems under Ubuntu’s flagship “Long-term-support” operating system. I’d love to be in touch with others running this…

C Barrington-Leigh

Sep 29, 2015

GNU/Linux at McGill: Calling all users! Please join a support discussion board

A theme among my posts since 2011 has been the challenges of being a GNU/Linux desktop user at McGill University but outside the departments (Math, Physics, Computer Science?) which support the…

C Barrington-Leigh

Sep 24, 2015

Composing and typesetting a funding proposal using LyX (SSHRC/ NSERC /CIHR)

This is one of the geekier posts I’ve written, in the sense that the number of people for whom this might be useful is… small and they are not likely to search for it.

C Barrington-Leigh

Jan 8, 2015

Solving collective action problems is what society does

I taught an introductory undergraduate course in environment, society, and sustainability this past term. We look at big-picture environmental problems from a mostly-social-science perspective.

C Barrington-Leigh

Jul 30, 2014

Review: System76 and their “Sable Touch” desktop computer

It’s still hard to buy a turn-key or supported GNU/Linux computer. I keep trying, and I especially prefer to avoid paying what’s called the Microsoft Tax, i.e. the hardware-bundled cost of Microsoft software, which is how they…

C Barrington-Leigh

Jun 14, 2014

Inline plots in ipython under Ubuntu (14.04)

This may be my shortest blog post ever, but I’ve been wondering (even with Google’s help) for years why I cannot get my matplotlib graphics to display inline in ipython. This is not always desirable, since they’re not editable/zoomable like they are as…

C Barrington-Leigh

Oct 25, 2013

My feather crock pot (how we will cook in the future)

This is an interlude from my normal blog themes. Just a little bit of physics tells you, I think, how we will cook in a future in which energy is electric and a bit more precious. It seems in North America “retained heat cooking” and…

C Barrington-Leigh

Oct 24, 2013

Ubuntu 13.04 and 13.10 (updated for 14.04 and 14.10) on Lenovo X230/X230-Tablet convertible tablet

If you consider yourself a user, not a tinkerer, the number one rule of running GNU/Linux is not even to try it except on hardware that others have already tried…

C Barrington-Leigh

Oct 13, 2013

Printing (PDF) to uPrint printers at McGill from GNU/Linux

It’s been six months since I notified McGill ICS of an update for their page on using the campus uPrint service from GNU/Linux.