About HelpYrself

A Quick Note on why HelpYrself

I’m getting old and forgetful and keep reinventing the wheel, searching for answers that I’d already dealt with not all that long ago.

Hence, this document. I’m even reminding myself how to do certain things in Sphinx, which is the tool I use to create this document.

As in all things open source, we tend to create solutions to “scratch our own itch”. If anyone else finds it useful, fantastic. However, as with anything published, information can become dated, no-longer-relevant or, because the goal-posts have moved, just plain wrong. Consider this when using this information.

Reminders [to Myself] of Sphinx Stuff

Inline images

For externally-stored images (most will be stored on Tightbytes, for my pages):

* .. image:: http://www.tightbytes.com/Music/CReinecke/CReinecke1890.jpg

and for those stored with the data files:

* .. image:: ../images/blAltRtClick01.png

Embedded Video

This code:

.. raw:: html

<iframe width=”560” height=”315” src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/123xxxXXXyZ” frameborder=”0” allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>

<hr style=”height:4px;border-width:0;color:gray;background-color:gray”>

Should have 11 characters:

3LbsmS5TJXA
123xxxXXXyZ

Embedded Audio

This code:

.. raw:: html

        <audio controls="controls">
          <source src="http://tightbytes.com/music/Sketches/Sketch11.mp3" type="audio/wav">
          Your browser does not support the <code>audio</code> element.
        </audio>

…produces:

Creating Dotpoints

Once you’ve decided:

  • Select A.

  • Select B.

  • To identify C.

  • Finally, click on D.

Note: setting things to italics like this makes more impact - these have yielded reasonable results. You will almost certainly find better settings, which is the whole point of sharing this.

Another Example

As you can see from the example, an example of a fully-qualified path for Linux would be:

/home/robyn/Documents/Blender/Projects/AllTextures/AllSkin/Antonia/

or, for the Mac:

/Volumes/500GB/Blender/Projects/AllTextures/AllSkin/Antonia/

or, for Windows:

E:\MyRuntime\runtime\textures\VendorName\ImagesFolder\Character\

Horizontal Separator Lines

The code is this (minus the ‘*’):

     * .. raw:: html

<hr style="height:4px;border-width:0;color:gray;background-color:gray">

…which produces this:

Notes to Self

Danielle / Ryse - - Lisa / Max

If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents - the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts - i.e., of Materialism and Astronomy - are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.

    1. Lewis. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Kindle Locations 563-569). Kindle Edition.

After reading C. S. Lewis’s “Funeral of a Great Myth”, this discussion offers an interesting perspective. From “Funeral”:

Biological Evolution is a theory about how organisms change. Some of these changes have made organisms, judged by human standards, ‘better’ – more flexible, stronger, more conscious. The majority of the changes have not done so. As J. B. S. Haldane says, in evolution progress is the exception and degeneration the rule. Popular Evolutionism ignores this. For it, ‘Evolution’ simply means ‘improvement’. And it is not confined to organisms, but applied also to moral qualities, institutions, arts, intelligence and the like. There is thus lodged in popular thought the conception that improvement is, somehow, a cosmic law: a conception to which the sciences give no support at all. There is no general tendency even for organisms to improve.

To reach the positions held by the real scientists – which are then taken over by the Myth – you must, in fact, treat reason as an absolute. But at the same time the Myth asks me to believe that reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of a mindless process at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. The content of the Myth thus knocks from under me the only ground on which I could possibly believe the Myth to be true. If my own mind is a product of the irrational – if what seem my clearest reasonings are only the way in which a creature conditioned as I am is bound to feel – how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about Evolution?

They say in effect: ‘I will prove that what you call a proof is only the result of mental habits which result from heredity which results from bio-chemistry which results from physics.’ But this is the same as saying: ‘I will prove that proofs are irrational’; more succinctly, ‘I will prove that there are no proofs’. The fact that some people of scientific education cannot by any effort be taught to see the difficulty, confirms one’s suspicion that we here touch a radical disease in their whole style of thought. But the man who does see it, is compelled to reject as mythical the cosmology in which most of us were brought up. That it has embedded in it many true particulars I do not doubt: but in its entirety, it simply will not do. Whatever the real universe may turn out to be like, it can’t be like that.

Lewis, C. S.. Christian Reflections . HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.