blogging about technology & open source
I used the Mozilla Pocket service until recently. I had a few hundred bookmarks, mainly work-related articles, recipes and decent articles I wanted to keep for future reference. For some reason, while I bookmark stuff in Firefox, I have a bunch of common sites on the bookmark toolbar but never delve into my stored bookmarks. Out of site and out of mind, and also I might remember the content of the…
I like the idea of e-ink devices, and often think about how much I could make use of an e-ink tablet which allows writing with a stylus. The marketing hype would suggest that it’s a life changer, which seems a bit strong, since they essentially aim to perform a similar function to pen and paper. Recently I impulsively purchased a Kindle Scribe without having done much research on it. I’ve had a…
Last year I started using Obsidian in combination with some other tools to help with knowledge management. It’s quite common that I attempt to visit a web page to find the original content no longer exists, either as a result of the usual link-rot where websites die or get restructured, oreven due to wilful destruction of content in the case of many reddit pages, or nuking old content and domains…
The problem: I’m a tab hoarder. Anything I’m working on at the moment is generally kept in an open tab in Firefox, as work in progress. Typically I have 100-200 tabs open. Once I’ve finished a personal project, I close the tabs, sometimes bookmarking them first, but not really filing away the knowledge I’ve acquired in a useful way. Even when I’m documenting work projects, I’m not sure I’ve…
If you spend time working in the terminal, whether for work or leisure, a lot of the commands you type often have a dependency on other recent commands, might be repetitive actions, or be very similar to other commands previously run. Gaining mastery over your shell history is a great way to be more productive in the terminal.
If your blog is generated with a static site generator such as Hugo or Jekyll, you might not catch spelling errors in your content. An ideal devops-style workflow should check your markdown quality and spelling automatically when pushing a commit. As a starting point, I’m going to provide an easy script to manually spell-check your markdown before committing changes.
Errors are annoying, but more annoying are errors that trick you into wasting a day going round in circles and questioning your sanity.
…also known as “Solving the Working from Home bandwidth problem”. A common task I perform as part of my job is to download large files from websites onto a server. Often my aim is to download such files directly onto the Linux servers residing in the datacentre, and most of the time this is straight-forward: open an ssh connection to the server, and pass the url to the wget command. The file is…