Word, templates, rage

This is with Word 2019 for Mac. Why am I using Word, anyway? - because LibreOffice has stopped working with our membership database in SQLite, and wasn’t working at all well with a CSV export. Oh, and Word doesn’t work with SQLite either.

I managed to create a Word template by careful editing of the LibreOffice version; painful to have to work with CSVs, but better than filling in 100 membership letters by hand (most of our members have email, so a Python script using email.mime, smtplib, sqlite3 etc worked for them, leaving the diehards ...)

OK, the organisation has a new chair, time to update the template.

Where is it? Turns out, ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/User Content/Templates. Well done, Microsoft.

And then, the challenge is to find a way of editing the template. Whatever I try, whatever tips I follow on the net, all I can do is edit a document based on the template, which is not what I need to happen!

I would look into PDFs via fpdf2, but I should only have another year in this post and the next person might have an issue with that. (The same applies to using SQLite, of course. Hmm.)

So I guess it’s back to LibreOffice.

(Not) building GTK on Big Sur

People are having much trouble with GtkAda on Big Sur, so I thought "why not try building Gtk?" - as here.

Unfortunately, it's just too complicated & runs into so many problems that I give up.

Preparing for a Github PR

This is a note about preparing a pull request (PR) for a Github repository. As much as anything, it’s to stop me having to page back through my lab notebook to find out how I did it last time …

Developing for Cortex MCUs on a Raspberry Pi

Recently, on the Gitter Ada Programming Language lobby, there have been discussions on cross-compiling for Cortex M micro-controllers, specifically the BBC micro:bit, using the Raspberry Pi.

TL;DR: it's not going to be easy, unfortunately. Maybe later (or earlier?) Raspbian releases will help.