Five Acres with a View

Pandoc Demos

Demonstrations of how to use pandoc, a universal document converter.

The Plain Text Project

Why Plain Text Matters

Plain text. It’s boring. It’s unadorned. It seems so … well, so archaic. The digital equivalent of papyrus. But it isn’t.

Even in this age of documents that support rich formatting, plain text matters. It’s more than just a plain vanilla format that you’re forced to use when you can’t use your favourite word processor or online writing tool. It’s one of the best ways to create your documents, record and track your tasks, and a lot more.

So why does plain text matter? It’s a ubiquitous, almost universal format. You can easily create plain text documents on any operating system and on any device. You don’t need a specialized tool to do it, either. You can use software — like Gedit, TextEdit, or Notepad — that’s already installed on the computer or device. In a sense, you get plain text without additional charge.

Winter Storm 2026 Power Outages

1/25 at 9:00 am from PowerOutage.com.

Howtogeek Explains Video Formats

There are so many video formats. This How To Geek Article explains why.

Snow

I did not expect to wake up to this much snow this morning:

Winter Solstice

Every year around this time I try to find this poem by John M Ford: Winter Solstice, Camelot Station. This year, at Black Gate Magazine, I also found this discussion of the poem. And more recently: The Tiny Arthurian Masterpiece You Probably Haven’t Read.

The one who is King says “It all seemed so simple, once,”
And the best knight in the world says “It is. We make it hard.”

Magpie

For Christmas, we bought a carved wooden magpie from Tom Mizak.

My poor cell phone camera struggled to focus on this Christmas cactus. This cactus started from small pieces salvaged from a friend’s plant when we repotted it. My plant care routine of benign neglect works quite well for succulents and cacti.