Drew's site
Hey kids! Have you heard of piracy but don’t know how to do it cos you grew up while streaming worked okay? Well this is the guide for you! DISCLAIMER: It is only my intent that the advice offered here be used to download media that is in the public domain. While it’s true that the advice here could be employed to download recent movies and TV shows that are under copyright, and that that is its…
In the olden days, before my hermitage, I’ve worked as a glazier, a farmer and a builder. Proper working men’s jobs where you work with your hands and get dirty. Manipulating physical matter, like a real man , bending the fruits of the earth to my will. Not just typing into a computer like a woman . Dealing with middle class suburban and metropolitan men while undertaking those jobs was always an…
I watch a fair amount of films and TV and I also have a shit memory, so it’s nice to have a list of stuff I’ve watched with (very arbitrary) ratings. Not to obsessively track what I watch, I don’t care about that, but for those (frequent) times when I go “What was that good film we watched the other day?” or when people ask for recommendations. I used a website called Trakt for this and it worked…
For years I’ve heard extensive-terminal-users proselytise about pixel fonts. I’d never paid much attention because what is this, the 1800s? But I’ve been hankering for a bit of basicness in my computering recently so I thought I’d give them a pop. What is it “fonts”? Back in the olden days, when computers mainly did text, screens were divided into rows and columns of characters, and characters…
During this time of whatever it’s important to y’know. So let’s do that! Here are some things that I enjoyed for the first time in 2025 probably, regardless of when they were made. I’ll mostly lean towards less obvious stuff cos it’s fairly pointless highlighting stuff everyone knows about. With the exception of… Pluribus (2025) (tv) Everyone knows about this one already. I’m sure we’ve all had…
The chat program Trillian had the best emoticons. Back during the regency era, my friends and I fell in love with them immediately and took them to other platforms long after we stopped using Trillian. They had a derpy cuteness and abundance of personality without being overly specific. Their meaning was negotiated and contextual. Like the human interaction we humans enjoy.…
Much like John Major , I’m going Back to Basics . I use top instead of htop or whatever, I’ve returned to vim from neovim, I even tried going back to bash instead of zshell but that was a foolish mistake - all of youse bash users should really give zshell a go, it’s just better. Anyway, prompted by your friend and mine, Chris Were , I’ve been giving xterm a go. And it’s good! I’m sticking with it!…
It’s not just, as I’ve long thought, that the web has gone to shit. It’s that the web, as I think of it , no longer exists. When I think of the web, I think of a network of weird and interesting sites made by weird and interesting human beings. This is not what the web is now - it’s a handful of silos that hoover up, brand and monetise everything else. Small sites still exist, of course. But…
This is gonna be notes for myself as much as anything else. I often forget what static linking is exactly and have to look it up. Otherwise this is just my working through my thoughts towards containerised applications and immutability and stuff. Expect rambles. I’m not a coder, there may be errors/simplifications. Dynamic linking This is the ‘norm’ on Linux. This is where (ideally) there’s one…
I didn’t know about the ~/.ssh/config file until quite recently and it’s really handy, so I thought I’d share. ~/.ssh/config lets you make what I think of as ssh aliases. You can give connections short names and specify various connection settings ‒ pretty much anything you can pass to ssh ’s CLI can be configured here. Here’s a simple example: Host nas Hostname 192.168.1.10 Host laptop Hostname…
ddcutil is a program for messing with monitor settings. Brightness and colour levels and all that and – the one I’m interested in – input source . It works by magic. Or, as ddcutil ’s docs put it: ddcutil primarily uses DDC/CI (Display Data Channel Command Interface) to communicate with monitors implementing MCCS (Monitor Control Command Set) over I2C. Whatever that means. Obviously ddcutil will…
There are some fancy process monitoring TUI programs these days. Aside from the venerable htop there are also upstarts like glances and vtop and numerous others. But what about poor old neglected top? It may look like a bag of trowels out-of-the-box, but with a little care and attention it can look pretty cool, too. Here’s mine: /images/top_top.png And it does it without needing a huge scripting…