Blog

Kicking the wife out of the house

You might have read about me on a few occasions. I'm Jen aka thatgirljen, or here I think I'm lovingly referred to as the wife or the Mrs. My over-time job is being the mom, wife and partner. But enough [...]

Upgrade to Node.js 10.x or 11.x on Ubuntu 18.10

The latest and greatest, albeit not a long-term support release, from Canonical is here! Ubuntu 18.10, Cosmic Cuttlefish, was released this month and shipped with the current LTS version of Node.js, version 8. Actually, it's a minor revision behind at [...]

How to check if a string contains another string with JavaScript

Checking whether or not a string contains another string, or just a single character. It's a been a pretty unavoidable sanity check in my programming career. It's not quite a problem for the ages, but it comes up regularly and [...]

Finding which process is listening on a port

I'm known for having a lot of projects. These days I have a day job, am trying to grind out more posts a week on this blog, regularly write for Alligator.io, run HolidayAPI and Ginpop and am currently on the [...]

Blogging too frequently

Can you ever really blog too much? I wondered that so after my 10th anniversary post, which occurred outside of my usual Sunday or Monday posting schedule, I decided I would up my blogging frequency to three times a week [...]

VPS $5 Showdown - October 2018 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. Vultr

After many months of enduring inquiries about why I was no longer including Amazon's Lightsail VPS offering, I'm giving up in and including it in the mix again. Originally it was dropped because they don't currently offer Ubuntu 18.04 LTS [...]

Hibernate laptop on lid close with systemd-boot on Arch Linux

Want to start this post off by thanking my buddy Dean for writing this great guide to setting up hibernate with Arch Linux. Unfortunately, when I went to consult this post the other day to get things setup on my [...]

Portal at Eleven

Eleven years ago today, Portal was released. I happened to have picked the game up a few years later, in 2009, as part of one of the many Steam sales on The Orange Box. And like many games I've procured [...]

How to install YakYak on Arch Linux

YakYak is my favorite desktop client for Google Hangouts. It has a clean and familiar UI (with different themes), is cross platform and usually runs pretty well. It's an Electron app, so if that's a problem for you, this may [...]

Speed up your shell prompt when using Node Version Manager

I absolutely hate using version managers like nvm and rvm. These days I don't run any project session management like tmuxinator and tend to forget that I need to be switching Node.js versions depending on the project I am on [...]