Researcher in Computational Trust, Privacy, Security and Artificial Intelligence Zola 2026-05-12T00:00:00+00:00 https://www.magcamit.com/tags/tool/atom.xml 2026-04-22T00:00:00+00:00 2026-05-12T00:00:00+00:00 Michael Intal Magcamit https://www.magcamit.com/projects/bibtera/ <p><a href="https://github.com/anirbanbasu/bibtera" target="_blank"><button>Code repository</button></a></p> <p>The BibTeX format is a widely used format for managing bibliographic references in LaTeX documents. BibTeX is also a software program that processes these references to generate formatted bibliographies. Originally created by Oren Patashnik in 1985, the purpose of BibTeX was to provide a simple way to manage citations in LaTeX documents.</p> <h2 id="a-bit-of-background">A bit of background<a class="post-anchor" href="#a-bit-of-background" aria-label="Anchor link for: a-bit-of-background"><span aria-hidden="true">#</span></a> </h2> <section class="alert info" role="note" aria-labelledby="w7lSJQ9q"> <div class="alert-icon alert-icon-info"></div> <div class="alert-content" role="presentation"> <strong id="w7lSJQ9q" class="alert-title" aria-hidden="true">TLDR; want to install BibTera right away!</strong> <p>If you have the <a rel="external" href="https://rust-lang.org/tools/install/">Rust toolchain installed</a>, run the following command in your terminal to install BibTera.</p> <pre class="giallo" style="color: #F8F8F2; background-color: #272822;"><code data-lang="shellscript"><span class="giallo-l"><span style="color: #A6E22E;">cargo</span><span style="color: #E6DB74;"> install bibtera</span></span></code></pre><details> <summary>Important notes</summary> <p>BibTera is meant to work on Linux, including Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), and macOS. It may also work on Windows but there are no guarantees.</p> <p>Always check the project's GitHub repository for the latest installation instructions and updates.</p> <p><em><strong>BibTera is still in an early stage of development. It may have bugs making it unsuitable for production use yet. Use it at your own risk and please report any issues you encounter.</strong></em></p> </details> </div> </section> <p>My older website generated using the Hugo static site generator and the academic theme had an add-on of sorts that could generate a list of publications from a BibTeX file containing one or more entries. However, the current theme of this website and the Zola static site generator does not have such a feature. Indeed, it is a feature that is not expected to be intrinsic to either the theme or the static site generator, and is better implemented as a separate tool that can be used with any static site generator or even in other contexts.</p> <p>Hence, I decided to develop a command-line tool called BibTera that can parse a BibTeX file and generate formatted output using the <a rel="external" href="https://github.com/Keats/tera">Tera templating engine</a>. The tool is written in Rust for performance and reliability. The use of Tera allows one to output nearly any type of text format, Markdown being one of them, which can be used by the static site generator.</p> <h2 id="more-information">More information<a class="post-anchor" href="#more-information" aria-label="Anchor link for: more-information"><span aria-hidden="true">#</span></a> </h2> <p>You can find the following links related to the BibTera project.</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://github.com/anirbanbasu/bibtera" target="_blank">GitHub repository</a> for the BibTera project.</li> </ul> <p>Some of the use-cases of BibTera include but are not limited to the following.</p> <ul> <li>Generating a list of Markdown files corresponding to the entries in a BibTeX file.</li> <li>Generating a formatted bibliography in a specific style, such as APA, MLA, Chicago, and so on, from a BibTeX file.</li> <li>Converting a BibTeX file to another format, such as JSON, XML, and so on.</li> <li>Cleaning up a messy BibTeX file and outputting a well-formatted BibTeX file.</li> </ul> 2026-02-16T00:00:00+00:00 2026-04-24T00:00:00+00:00 Michael Intal Magcamit https://www.magcamit.com/projects/odir/ <p><a href="https://github.com/anirbanbasu/odir" target="_blank"><button>Code repository</button></a></p> <p><a rel="external" href="https://ollama.com/">Ollama</a> is an open-source tool that faciliates the user to download and run large language models (LLMs) such as Llama 3, Mistral, and Gemma on a local computer. It acts as a lightweight runtime and model manager, making it easy to use artificial intelligence (AI) models without relying on cloud services. It has the capability to run some models on the Ollama cloud too.</p> <h2 id="a-bit-of-background">A bit of background<a class="post-anchor" href="#a-bit-of-background" aria-label="Anchor link for: a-bit-of-background"><span aria-hidden="true">#</span></a> </h2> <section class="alert info" role="note" aria-labelledby="ZwHwx4Yv"> <div class="alert-icon alert-icon-info"></div> <div class="alert-content" role="presentation"> <strong id="ZwHwx4Yv" class="alert-title" aria-hidden="true">TLDR; want to install ODIR right away!</strong> <p>If you have the <a rel="external" href="https://rust-lang.org/tools/install/">Rust toolchain installed</a>, run the following command in your terminal to install ODIR.</p> <pre class="giallo" style="color: #F8F8F2; background-color: #272822;"><code data-lang="shellscript"><span class="giallo-l"><span style="color: #A6E22E;">cargo</span><span style="color: #E6DB74;"> install odir</span></span></code></pre> <p>Alternatively, if you have <a rel="external" href="https://brew.sh/">Homebrew</a> installed, you can run the following command to install ODIR.</p> <pre class="giallo" style="color: #F8F8F2; background-color: #272822;"><code data-lang="shellscript"><span class="giallo-l"><span style="color: #A6E22E;">brew</span><span style="color: #E6DB74;"> install anirbanbasu/tap/odir</span></span></code></pre><details> <summary>Important notes</summary> <p>ODIR is meant to work on Linux, including Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), and macOS. It may also work on Windows but there are no guarantees.</p> <p>Always check the project's GitHub repository for the latest installation instructions and updates.</p> </details> </div> </section> <p>While <code>ollama pull &lt;model:tag&gt;</code> mostly works, there is a documented problem, see <a rel="external" href="https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/941">issue 941</a>. The crux of the problem is that Ollama fails to pull a model with an error message as follows.</p> <blockquote> <p><code>Error: digest mismatch, file must be downloaded again: want sha256:1a640cd4d69a5260bcc807a531f82ddb3890ebf49bc2a323e60a9290547135c1, got sha256:5eef5d8ec5ce977b74f91524c0002f9a7adeb61606cdbdad6460e25d58d0f454</code></p> </blockquote> <p>This is particularly frequent on corporate networks, which typically have man-in-the-middle (MITM) proxies for HTTPS traffic with self-signed certificates.</p> <p>My solution in August 2025 was to write a command-line tool in Python that downloads the model file directly from the registry, bypassing Ollama's own method of downloading. This led to the <a rel="external" href="https://github.com/anirbanbasu/ollama-downloader">Ollama Downloader</a> project. In February 2026, I wanted to port it in Rust for better performance and support more features, such as parallel downloads and resume capability. This led to the creation of Ollama Downloader in Rust or ODIR, pronounced as <em>oh dear</em>!</p> <h2 id="more-information">More information<a class="post-anchor" href="#more-information" aria-label="Anchor link for: more-information"><span aria-hidden="true">#</span></a> </h2> <p>You can find the following links related to the ODIR project.</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://github.com/anirbanbasu/odir" target="_blank">GitHub repository</a> for the Ollama Downloader in Rust (ODIR) project.</li> <li><a href="https://crates.io/crates/odir" target="_blank">Rust crate on Crates.io</a> for ODIR.</li> <li><a href="https://github.com/anirbanbasu/ollama-downloader" target="_blank">GitHub repository</a> of the original Python Ollama Downloader project, <em>now deprecated</em>.</li> </ul>