A Handbook for the Lazy

by Lorenzo Rovigatti

Introduction

I am a computational physicist and I spend most of the day in front of a computer. I consider myself quite the lazy person, and I find many of the daily tasks that are associated with my job to be extremely boring and repetitive. During the course of the years I have developed my own way of dealing with these chores.

These notes contain many tricks of the trade I routinely use during my everyday job to make my life easier and, which is of the outmost importance for me, less boring. I am sure many of the solutions I have found to cope with these common issues can be solved in multiple ways. I am equally sure that many of the solutions I overlooked are plain better than the paths I chose to take. If you find that this is the case, feel free to drop me a line at lorenzo.rovigatti@gmail.com or to add your own solution to the book and create a pull request!

How to use this book

The book is written in Markdown and translated to HTML using Pandoc.

The be-lazy.md and be-lazy.html files contain the entirety of the book in Markdown and HTML format, respectively.

If you want to change the content of the book just edit one or more chapter files and then, if you have Bash and Pandoc installed on your system (and the Pandoc executable is in your path) compile the book from the source by running the compile.sh script. This will generate the be-lazy.md, be-lazy.html and README.md files.

This is not a book to be read in one take. On the contrary, it should be considered as a collection of tips & tricks to be referred to when the need arises.

I plan to add as many figures and examples as possible. These will be included in the source of the book.