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Introduction I didn’t get as much reading done in March as I had hoped, as I was laid low with sickness twice: the first time, with a case of strep throat that the doctor described rather bluntly as “very bad” — not exactly hope-inspiring words to hear from a medical professional — and I was prescribed a week of antibiotics; on the final day of this course of…
Introduction When I created this blog, its purpose was primarily to give me a place to put my thoughts on issues that mattered to me but that were mind-numbingly boring to any other reasonable person, and in keeping with that original spirit, I want to talk today about how I use bookmarks (that is, the physical kind you put in books). I want to make it clear that I make no pretence of being…
Introduction Over the past few months, I have been making an effort to regain the rate of reading that I once had as a child, and in the process of doing so I thought that it might be nice to document the books that I complete each month so that I can keep a record of the books that I have read, reflect on my experience reading, and make recommendations about them. I try to broaden my horizons…
The national flag of Ireland The Importance of Orange You probably don’t need me to tell you that the flag in the above image is the national flag of Ireland. You also probably don’t need me to tell you that the colours in that image are green, white, & orange. However, you may have heard people referring to the colours of the flag as “green, white, & gold” before, or…
Introduction Roughly two years ago now, I created my utility_scripts repository on GitHub, which contains all the scripts that I’ve written for use on my GNU/Linux laptop. These scripts are generally short, useful scripts, that make basic tasks on my computer easier, ranging from creating dynamic menus to select Bluetooth devices or WiFi networks to connect to, to listing the count of open…
Introduction On a UNIX-like system, one often has the need to edit a write-restricted file and thus to escalate one’s privileges to do so; the obvious approach that might initially occur to you is to use sudo vim or sudo $EDITOR to edit the file with superuser privileges, but this is inadvisable for a number of reasons, the majority of which boil down to the principle of least privilege :…
An interactive affiliation network built for blog posts & tags on this website Introduction Hugo websites typically consist of blog posts, which are organised into taxonomies with the use of tags . In a typical Hugo website, these tags are listed for each blog post, and a tags page can be used to navigate the blog posts belonging to each tag (although I suspect that tagging blog posts is one of…
Introduction Anchor links are hyperlinks that link to a different section within the current webpage or document, rather than to an external webpage, thus allowing for links to be shared to specific sections of a webpage and for a table of contents with clickable links to be created for a webpage. Anchor links are probably most commonly found in online technical documentation, but can be seen in…
Although I now forget the context, a friend once sent me a snippet of shell code that he was using to remove symbolic links to files on his computer, using a shell command that I had never seen before: unlink . I, like him (and presumably like you if this is your first exposure to the command), assumed that this command is used to remove links to files on a UNIX-like system. This is quite an…
A concern that may occur to you when you are designing a website is whether or not the font that you are using is “web-safe”, meaning that the user will be able to render it on their end when they load your webpage because they already have that font on their device. Web-safe fonts include the typical well-known fonts, like Times New Roman, Arial, etc. If you are using non-web-safe…
Introduction First of all, I’m not trying to tell you how to speak; how you speak is entirely up to yourself. Second of all, I’m not advising you on how to be pedantic and “correct” people who didn’t ask for correction over minor grammatical matters; if you understood their meaning, there’s no need to be rude in a sad attempt to one-up them. The purpose of this…
If you’ve ever gotten an Iarnród Éireann train from anywhere west of Portarlington to Dublin, you’ll have passed through a railway station named “Sallins & Naas”. It gets its unusual name from the fact that despite being located in a small-ish town called Sallins, it is a short distance from & serves the much larger town of Naas, which is the largest town in County Kildare…
First Year of University In my first year of university, I took pen & paper notes, using a designated refill pad and binder per class. Pages were stapled together by topic or chapter, and then inserted into a plastic pocket in the binder. These notes were comprehensive, meaning that any information that was in the lecture slides or said by the lecturer was included in my notes. This technique…
What is qutebrowser? Qutebrowser 1 is a keyboard-focused, minimal web browser written in Python. It makes use of Vim-like keybindings, and is surprisingly fast & memory-efficient considering the language in which it is written: it generally starts up faster than the Brave browser on my machine, and consumes less memory than Firefox (which I’ve had memory leak issues with in the past). It has…
Introduction Memorising (or “learning”) the fretboard refers to when an individual learns which musical notes correspond to what positions on the fretboard of their instrument, a skill that is useful for playing just about any instrument that has frets. In particular, “learning the fretboard” is a topic frequently discussed in guitar circles for its importance in…
Introduction Normally, when videos such as lecture recordings are posted to Canvas, there is a “Download file.mp4 ” or similar link available on the page, or at the very least you can right-click on the playing video and select “Save media”. Sometimes, however, there is no such link available, which is quite annoying for people like me who want to hoard lecture content.…
What is My Actual Name? The home page of this website introduces me as “ Aindréas Ó hAoḋa (Aindréas Ó hAodha / Andrew Hayes)”, which I imagine could cause some confusion, especially for non-Irish people. If you were to ask “Well, what does it say on your birth certificate?”, you’d likely only be further confused, as the name on my birth certificate 1 is not any of…