Recent content on Smaller Fish
Bubblewrap is the sandboxing technology behind Flatpak. It uses Linux namespaces to isolate processes from the rest of your system - limiting filesystem access, network capabilities, and more. It’s powerful stuff. The problem is that actually using it requires memorizing dozens of flags and getting the incantation exactly right. One wrong flag and your sandbox either doesn’t work or is…
Many devs get a productivity boost from using ChatGPT (,…) or Copilot in their day-to-day jobs, and this is generally fine unless organizational compliance concerns make this a problem. So, should devs be able to augment their capabilities using ChatGPT during (remote) tech interviews? Here are a few ways recruiting is changing, based on my observations while making several lower-budget…
I read a post on HN about somebody who used ChatGPT to invent the rules for a new human language. I thought it would be interesting to see if ChatGPT could also be used to create a new programming language. I won’t bore you with too much of the dialog, since we’ve all seen impressive exchanges so far. This post summarizes what I learned about working with ChatGPT to do a task like…
Recent versions of Ubuntu turned on a particularly annoying feature: intrusive system notifications that warn of the pending update of a Snap managed application. Here’s an example: Aside from this notification apparently not being tied properly into the KDE notification system (it doesn’t show in the list of recent notifications that’s available from the system tray…
I bought a Unihertz Atom XL in early 2022, aiming to find a small phone with a long battery life. I wanted a phone that was less obvious in my pocket, was easier to hold and navigate with one hand, and, I hoped, would be a little more utilitarian and a little less addictive. There are almost no Android phones out there under 5", and so very quickly I ended up browsing Unihertz’s catalog, and…
The seemingly tranquil river, over one kilometer wide, rounds a bend with increased urgency and plunges dramatically into an 85 meter deep fault marking the edge of the prehistoric volcanic plateau. Downstream, the Pampas of Argentina and Uruguay, ancient forests beaten back by apparently endless pasture and fields, among the greatest agricultural expanses on the planet. A thousand kilometers…
“Internationalization” is, roughly speaking, geek-speak for the process of supporting multiple languages on a website. For a company doing business in multiple countries, it needs to be done - otherwise you’ll risk losing the attention of people who don’t speak your development team’s native language. There are standards defined that specify what language to serve a…
The internet is not as good as it used to be. Information is siloed into walled gardens like Facebook, Nextdoor, and so on. Google results are saturated with SEO spam. Wordpress is a mess that keeps on chugging through inertia; Medium, while clean, is behind a paywall; Reddit and Twitter are increasingly hiding their value behind registration and/or paywalls; Substack is fine if you want to be…
When you search online for lists of recommended routers to run DD-WRT on, Asus comes up frequently, even in non-SEO-driven listicles. This is quite frustrating, because for the past few years Asus have blocked (most) third party firmware from being installed. When you try to upload firmware using the admin UI, you get a message that says roughly “for compliance reasons, we do not permit…
Road engineers in Costa Rica do not worry about snow and ice. Whereas highway builders in the US might dynamite a chunk of a mountain to provide a road that maintains a reasonable gradient as it climbs, the road engineers of the tropics are happy to run straight upslope if there’s no good alternative. Asphalt was laid surprisingly recently on some relatively important routes; the Costanera ,…
People Love Institutions Institutions are comforting and predictable. They bring some measure of order to the world, even when that order is rife with inefficiency. When we moved to Costa Rica, one of the surprising differences that we encountered was that there is no postal delivery service. Because there’s no postal service, there was never any need for mailing addresses, and so houses and…
It’s fine! We bought used cars when we moved to Costa Rica. There’s significant import tax on pretty much everything down here, meaning that it’s expensive to bring your car from the states, and also that the price of new vehicles is significantly marked up. I opted for a Toyota FJ - the secondary roads can get quite washed out during rainy season, and I wanted a reliable vehicle…