Blog posts by Mark!
I've made a new open source tool called Wizard Cut . This tool takes a video, transcribes the text and allows you to make deletions to that text. Then you can get a copy of the video with all the text you deleted from the transcription removed! I find this super duper useful for videos. About 90% of the edits are cuts and removing dead silence (this tool also shows big long periods of silence for…
(this is kinda a counter to my own post on this topic ) Maybe it's fine to have a complicated website. The only thing that has to stay the same is the /content/ as long as the content is in some form that can be read in the future I think that's probably ok. Plain text is still the way to go. Currently i'm using sqlite (which I don't see going anywhere) but a dump into a .sql file is just plain…
Alirghty gamers, I've launched a new product: Monitor Monkey It's the easiest way to monitor your Linux servers. Everything that runs server side is open source, very quick and very easy to install. It's written in go so it works everywhere. Very cool. The first server is free, from then it's the cheapest monitoring you will find on the internet. All it does is monitor your servers, it will alert…
If you're a mouth breather (I am when I'm focusing on a computer for some reason) and would like to be reminded that you are mouth breathing check out this new tool I've made here The Arcane Mouth Breathing Detector Runs fully client side using JS, basically it detects when your mouth opens (or deviates from a baseline) and plays a lil ding to remind you to close up.
If you go to the home page of my website you will notice a status bar in a marquee tag. I got an account at status.cafe and use a bookmarklet they provide to update my status. It's really very easy. I would have built my own tool but the code that runs status.cafe is open source and everyone else on there has a funky website and I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon :) Still update…
If you are a devloper and you are not using AI you are going to get left behind. If you don't think this you are wrong. If you are scared about not getting work in the future that's good. You should be. You need to be the one leveraging ai, it can accelerate your development massively if you allow it to. Pretty soon all programming will basically be done in english and the ai will probably write…
I've added analytics to this site, I built my own tool to analyse log files for this, source for that tool I really like how it shows my currently subscribed users to my rss feed, that's the metric I would like to see growing :) You can visit the analytics here they are updated every hour and show a weeks worth of data.
Rss is brilliant. An overview of my consumption of rss feeds: Miniflux as rss reader Separate tags for news and aggregators that don't display on my home page Go through all the new rss feed entries that are not news/aggregators. Read ones that I can read quickly there and then, send long ones to Wallabag to read later. Below is a more detailed explanation of my setup. Miniflux I've started to use…
I think I've somehow managed to gamify all my work all the time. The devlog has become the thing I'm chasing. Now I'm not making updates just for the sake of it, every change is a legit change I've done in one of my projects. I add a change when I've done something "computery" in one of my projects, adding a new feature, doing some sysadmin, updating my website. It's crazy to think it's working,…
My blogs tagging system seems to create some form of infinite loop for web spiders seeking information about my posts. The tagging system is pretty insane but cool because you can click each tag and see what posts match that tag and from there can click on other tags to see what posts match both those tags. However I have not for some reason written code to clear tags that are already selected…
I've started to create slopware. It's software that only I use made using ai. They are not throwaway scripts. If this was made about a year or 2 ago then these would be well received open source projects. They are full applications with many features. But, because they are slopware they are effectively unmaintainable. I wonder how much modern software is effectively slopware now. When I say…
I've removed email subscribes from this website. I had less then 50 subscribers and no new ones for about 2 years. I have replaced it with something much cooler, a reply to me via email link. If you want to have a chat with me about something I've written please do email me :) It's a direct mailto link so let's hope for no spam. If spam I'll change it to some alias I may add it back in the future,…
I've made a devlog. You can check it out here . I wanted a place to put updates on my projects and what I have done today. Keeps me accountable and stuff. I could use twitter but nah. It also serves as a kind of documentation of my projects. Much like a commit log but it feels different then that. I won't write about what I've done at work or consulting or whatever. Just my projects. Inspiration…
Hit counters are cool so I've added one at the end of my blog posts. Wish I did this a long time ago as it does not show historic data (would have over 100k on some!!) It works by just incrementing a number in a database if your user agent does not contain "bot" or "crawler". So it's ripe for abuse ;) This does go against the philosophy of adding new features to my website that I detailed in this…
My website is breaking. I want this website to be my home on the internet for ever. This website has way to many dependencies, is complicated for the sake of it (I was learning the tech) and as such is slowly starting to fall apart. What do I want Easily searchable. This could be just ctrl + f but perhaps a tagging system is better. In fact maybe some form of tagging search system within the post…
Is there an idea here? Some kind of service that emails you asking what you did today? Then could upload that somewhere for other people to see? Could this be a thing at companies for employers? Sounds a bit intrusive for that... I would use something like this on this website though, like a scrolling, plain text widget that I can easily update but maybe it's a product idea? Not sure hmmm..…
My writing sucks, I want it to get better so I'll write more. I've read somewhere that you are more expressive when you are talking to someone. I'll write like I'm talking to someone. I'll also write about whatever comes to mind, I'll literally click on the create a post button and write something.
Imagine having a reading goal. If it helps you read more I guess it's fine but reading to hit a reading goal is like playing video games to hit 1000 hours on the video game. NO one should be tracking their playtime and using that as a metric of goodness. When I used goodreads I was always thinking about ohhhh I gotta make me reading goal and think of a fancy review for this book I'm reading. Just…
I started with this blog that you are reading this on now. I learnt a lot making this. Mainly that I should have just used a static site generator. Of course I actually learnt all about Django. The only Django application I had made before this was the polls app in the tutorial and that just kinda confused me but gave me a good starting point. For some unknown reason I also messed with caching for…
I've created bskytoolbox.com It's a fun little project that uses blueskys amazing websocket firehose to make some cool little tools with it. Most of them just connect to the firehose using JS so nothing is stored server side but the one I like the most is the mentions tracker. This connects on the backend with a simple python daemon that tracks for words you ask it to. It's pretty cool and a good…
If you are just starting out with vim, this post will make learning vim so much easier. (I made a video on this topic here ) Some basic things Vim has operators, a few are: y - (y)ank (copy) text c - (c)hange text d - (d)elete text Vim has motions: w - Move forward a (w)ord b - Move (b)ack a word { } - Next paragraph/previous paragraph Combining them all with numbers If we press 2w vim will jump…
Just some commands that I did not know for awhile. These are explained more in this video (Formatting on this is not great, copied it directly from text file - sorry 😢) gi go the the place last inserted g; g, keep searching gv go to last visual y/search yank up to search, can delete and change with d/search and c/search * # Search for a word under cursor Forward/backward respectively ctrl + [ for…
Hardware At my home office, I use a desktop PC with Fedora Linux installed. I use the i3 window manager and 2 monitors. Keyboard Ever since my Model M keyboard broke I have used a standard Dell keyboard. It's fine, works great; only annoyance is it's not mechanical, sometimes I am not sure I have pressed a button. There is something I like about it that I can't really explain though. OS / Desktop…
I have created a new project - https://Snipthat.io It's a browser extension that allows you to save any interesting snippets of text you come across whilst browsing the web to a central location. It's still very much in an alpha release and currently you can only install it on Firefox. The Chrome extension is still going through the approvals process. The tech is pretty simple, the extension is…
Sometimes when I need to fix an issue I don't know enough about the issue to ask the correct question. If I could explain it to someone in person or some kind of chat I would probably be able to muddle my way through it however when it comes to distilling that question into words I struggle. Is this a lack of knowledge on my part, sure it is. If I knew more about the topic then I would find it…
I like using push to talk whenever I have to use my microphone. Unfortunately the program I use the microphone the most with - Microsoft Teams - does not support this. So I went ahead and made a global push to talk script. It only works on Linux (for now) and is written in python. It does work though, so I now have push to talk on any application where I want it! The script is here
I have created a new website goodwebsites.org The purpose of this website is to list websites that I think are good. That I think are good being the key point here. They are not what "most" people would consider good. The have soul and character and present information well. I like that. If you have any websites you would like to add please contact me :) The website is very barebones and the…
This blog post got to the number one spot on Hacker News As a result this website received more traffic then it ever had and still held up. Getting to #1 was the best way to stress test this website and proved that I was telling the truth in that blog. Full write-up coming soon, but a very quick stat (generated from log files as my analytics crashed) looks like 70,000+ 80,000+ people visited my…
Probably. This website is hosted on a very cheap (£4 a month) VPS. This server has 1 CPU and 2GB of RAM. The slowest part of this website can theoretically handle 4.2 million requests a day. I got these results by benchmarking by websites. I will be benchmarking 2 websites that are hosted on this server. This very website and peepopoll.com Peepopoll.com is basically a single web page with some…
It's not often that I praise software. But Xournal++ has made my life so much easier recently. I use it to fill in PDF forms. It allows you to enter text anywhere in the document. As well as allowing freehand drawing which is great for signing and ticking boxes. I have recently had to fill in many forms and printing them out and scanning them back in was getting very tedious. Any other program…
I take a lot of notes, most of the time I use my normal note taking system which I am not going to go into detail on this post. The tool I use the most is called note it's a very simple bash script. All it does is echo the current date and whatever I type into a file called notes.txt, for example mark@Zeta ~ $ note "this is a note for the blog" mark@Zeta ~ $ tail -n1 notes.txt…
I wrote a guide on how to use cron on this website The website is about how to set up a Linux server and how to host things on it so you can own your own services and data and be a independent internet user like the internet was meant to be. The site is called landchad, Land being "internet land" and Chad as in the meme Chad. A bit tongue-in-cheek but I am kind of surprised that there is no…
I'm playing around a bit with an Arduino. Something has clicked in my brain about how cool it is that something can just run code without having to mess around with an Operating system. It's cool being able to plug this in anywhere and have it do what you told it to. I have always heard of microcontrollers and had a sort of abstract idea of what they where but never really had a concrete idea of…
I have made a Microlog (see the top bar of this site) I tend to have lots of thoughts that are not really that useful to anyone and are not suited to a full blog post. I guess I could post these on twitter but it's nice to have these on your own website. I'm not sure what you can expect there. I won't put in much effort, if any, into the posts but it should be a fun experiment. I may also put TILs…
The best long term solution to bitcoin/crypto passphrase storage is on clay tablets. We have clay tablets from 4000BC that are still readable. Currently people are using stamped metal to store there keys, I don't see any stamped metal that has lasted over 6000 years.
Profilecloudbot is a small project that I have created. It's main purpose was to get me back in the swing of things in terms of creating. I have been on a bit of a slump lately when it comes to making projects and wanted something easy to get me back into creating things. For that purpose, it has worked great! I am now working much more on my projects. Although it was small in scope like all…
I Launched my new website https://youtubetopodcast.com only using Reddit. I did not use the normal routes of Product hunt, hacker news and all that jazz. I did not think this product was "worthy" of those platforms. In fact calling it a product is wrong, it's more of a tool. Not designed to make money (besides donations ;)) and more to actually be something that is occasionally useful to people.…
Django is a python web framework. A way to make amazing websites. It allows for a fast, but also safe development process. I find it a joy to work with. This website was written in Django, it took me a long time to make but that's because it was my first project. I gained a lot of knowledge that I can easily apply to other projects I might make. I'm going to go over the very basics of making a…
Often when reading about Django you hear about "asynchronous tasks" - things that run in the background. You think, "ah that sounds very useful!" and then look into it. Most results will point to "celery" as the go to software to run the async tasks along with a myriad of configuration options that quickly become confusing. There is also a "message broker" what the hell is that? I'll be showing…
This website is bloated. It is a blundering giant, a monster. However, it's this way for a reason... As a way to learn, I built this blog using Django. I had been going through tutorial after tutorial 1 and wanted to see if I could apply me knowledge. The best way to do that is to make a project of your own, with no hand holding. Before building this website I had little knowledge of anything…