While I am a huge fan of widgets on iOS, most apps miss the mark in terms of what they offer via their widgets. Because I’m not one to settle, I have been on a quest to build my own widgets so that I can get exactly what I desire.
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There comes a time in every software engineer’s life, when they need to run a command, but only after a port has been opened by a completely separate process. Sure, you could sit around and wait for the port to open up before running your command, but what’s the fun
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The unattended-upgrades package on Debian is absolutely fantastic. It takes cares of the stable packages that can be installed safely automatically, leaving you with fewer manual upgrades that you have to deal with yourself. Sadly though, I ran into an issue recently where the unattended-upgrades script was running in the
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While attempting to update my dotfiles locally on my MacBook Pro, I ran into a bit of a dilemma with one of my files that I had edited but never committed. Not a big deal, I can just run git stash and apply the changes again later. No such luck
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One of the more noticeable things to come out of me switching from Arch Linux back over to Debian, is that I’m rarely running into any issues. Because I’m not running into any weirdness, it’s been at a detriment to my blog, as my time on Arch was a constant
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I’m a big fan of our Eero Mesh Wi-Fi 6 setup, even with the subscription service that will probably eventually lead to replacing it with something that doesn’t have an up sell like that. It’s been one of the best setups we’ve had, handling both multiple story and single story
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I’ve gotten my hands on some great tech items this year. Venturing into smart garage door openers, a handful of new Apple goodies, and even leaning into “play” a lot more thanks to Valve’s Steam Deck. While those items are all well and good, and have been serving me quite
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Node.js has included a persistent history with it’s REPL (real-eval-print loop) for quite some time now. It’s a fantastic quality of life feature, and it even supports reverse-i-search. The other day, I got to wondering, where the heck does this history even live? Turns out, it’s just living in a
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I don’t just use the command-line, I live on it. With doing some much on the CLI, I always have the Terminal app running, regardless of my host operating system. Sadly, on macOS, I do find myself accidentally hitting Command+Q from time to time, which abruptly bails me out of
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The tree command is one of my favorites. As the name of the command suggests, it simply lists the contents of a directory in a tree-like format. Think of it like ls *, which outputs the contents of each directory, but instead of a flat list, the files are shown
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Buffers are powerful stuff. They make it easy to work with raw binary data, and streaming data can leverage them. Many third-party Node.js dependencies leverage buffers in one way or another, especially libraries dealing with data transport. So what the heck are we supposed to do with a Buffer when
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Universally unique identifiers (UUID) are one of my favorite things. They are easy to generate, without collision, and they make it easy to expose an identifier to end users without it being so obviously guessable, like an automatically incrementing integer value. While they are fantastic, the ability to generate one
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My recent migration from Arch Linux to Debian (testing) has been an extremely smooth one, but not without it’s issues. A small issue I ran into early on was a problem with totem, the video app, crapping out. While I’m not sure exactly what the heck went wrong, the quick
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While I’ve had iPhones and iPads in the past, and have been back on iOS from Android for the last year, there are still some things that I’m ignorant to. One of those things, is why most of the games I played on my iPhone only played sounds when I
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Jira’s query language (JQL) is a query language similar to SQL. That being said, the syntax for doing something similar to SQL’s LIKE statement is nothing like how you’d do it in SQL. While deviating from the syntax that was used for inspiration isn’t uncommon, it’s quite peculiar that the
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Periodically, I check my site analytics to see which posts are getting the most traffic. It never ceases to amaze me at how many posts documenting older versions of Ubuntu, as far back as 16.04 LTS, still receive regular traffic. While they may not be evergreen forever, there’s something to
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We love the Apple TV, but ever since upgrading to the Apple TV Siri Remote, we’ve run into situations where the volume controls just decide they are done working. The speculation is that it has something to do with the hand off to and from Apple AirPods somehow messing things
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A bit more than a month ago, I wrote about switching from my beloved Arch Linux to my other beloved, Debian. After taking the month of September to settle in and figured out if I had made a horrible mistake, I’m happy to report that I feel like I made
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Variables. One of the cornerstones of most, if not all, programming languages. They save you time by not having to type the same crap over and over. They can be manipulated for your own gain. They can even be used in your MySQL queries. The declaration syntax for variables in
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I live on the command-line, and a huge chunk of that time is spent in Vim. Well, Neovim, actually. I do everything from writing code, to writing for my blog, as well as other prose that I have in the works. One thing that comes up pretty regularly, thanks to
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The implementation of uuidgen on Linux returns all lowercase letters by default. The implementation of uuidgen on macOS returns all uppercase letters by default. This triggers the hell out of me, by default. Usually when I approach consistency between macOS and Linux, both of which I use daily, I will
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The thing that I miss most of all since moving from Arch Linux back over to Debian is the Arch User Repository (AUR). Every package I ever needed was there, sometimes multiple times based on different forks that folks were maintaining. Even without the AUR, Debian has a massive number
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One of the best aspects of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is that a full featured command-line utility exists for it. If you’ve ever spent a decent amount of time in the AWS Console (their web interface) then you understand why this is a good thing. As you venture into better
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After the better part of the last decade running Arch Linux as my primary distro of choice on my laptops, I’ve decided to hang it up and move back to Debian. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with Arch Linux. In fact, it’s been one of my favorite
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Repeat after me, “screenshots are NOT documentation”. Neither are videos, looms, or animated GIFs. Links to Google Docs or random websites, better, but not best. The aforementioned media types are often confused with real, honest to glob, documentation. When you’re asked to document something, you’re being asked to describe it.
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