BibLaTeX scripts and eras

How to manage BibLaTeX across time and cultures I wrote a paper in English using LaTeX. For my quite interesting topic some essential references did not exist in English. That might sound simple — just list the originals, plus some translation/cross-referencing work to get the necessary information! It isn’t that simple. This howto is for LaTeX authors with unusual references, especially non-latin scripts, latinisations, non-English references, rare scripts and ancient documents. In some of my sources I had all of these at once, giving me this situation: ...

February 3, 2026 · 2629 words · Dan Shearer

Open Source to Chemical Rockets

(written in 2008) How a young Australian discovered Open Source and a career. Eventually learning that a mixture of code, law and mathematics is a frontier for human rights battles. It isn’t often I come face to face with myself after a twenty-something year break, but I did yesterday. As a first year university student at the South Australian Institute of Technology in Adelaide I did landscape gardening oddjobs for companies. I noticed a company called Australian Launch Vehicles (ALV), which sounded very cool, so in I went. ALV was founded by a pair of entrepreneurial rocket scientists. Despite decades of rocketry history in South Australia, there was no local space industry. (Establishing Australian spaceflight in 1987 was ambitious; they failed but others are giving it a go.) ...

February 2, 2026 · 1352 words · Dan Shearer