My first (real) LinkedIn post - woot! https://www.linkedin.com/posts/yatescolin_here-is-a-code-sample-obfuscated-from-a-activity-7286017536901447683-idjK Go read it please :-) 2025-01-17 #linkedin
finding duplicate files on the mac (or Linux) I've been messing around with https://unraid.net again, trying to tidy up my data which was spread across multiple disks. This has led to a bunch of interesting needs: removing duplicates finding series (Books, Music, Movies, TV) with missing items storing TBs of data temporarily as I move it around ... 2025-01-17 #macos #tip
Exposing localhost to the world It's sometimes useful exposing a web server running on your local machine to the big World Wide Web. Why? There are a bunch of services around that need to be able to access your website in order to analyse it For example, maybe you are doing some SEO or checking HTML validation, and exposing your local server means you can make a change and it is ... 2025-01-05 #cloudflare #dev #ngrok #webdev
hearing loss My hearing is pretty weird. An audiologist (from Specsavers) said I have excellent hearing up to a certain frequency and then it stops, like a cliff edge. No gentle gradual decrease, just really bad loss. What I can hear I can hear very well. What I can't hear I can't hear at all. I can hear the bassy sounds but the "t"s, "h"s, and "s"s just ... 2025-01-04 #life #old
Apple Shortcuts - meh DISCLAIMER: It's entirely possible that some of these pain points are due to me not being idiomatic! So Apple Shortcuts (mac and iOS) has the potential to be * ... 2025-01-03 #apple shortcuts #macos
Emailing a Contact Us Form Creating a no-JS contact us form I wanted to create a "Contact us" form for my business web site (https://fhlgroup.co.uk/#contact) but with a strict "NO JS" policy (I'll explain later but TLDR: we've lost the essence of the web in favour of JSifying everything). Turns out there is a lovely little service https://web3forms.com/ which works f ... 2024-12-26 #js #no-js #web
Sending Docs to Kindle Macos So I wanted to send a recent book I'd purchased (https://www.thegoodbook.co.uk/just-be-honest) to the Kindle from my macbook. I hadn't quite realised how complicated it could be - sigh. Native Kindle App "Install Kindle" I thought - surely they must have a way? Nope - logged in and was greeted with a very elegant and clean UI. However, afte ... 2024-11-30 #kindle #macos #saga
Modules within Emacs The pitch Do you maintain your own .emacs.d and worry that it is a single pile of complected and unmaintainable logic? Fancy a bit of spacemacs' layers? Modules, modules and more modules for the win. Tooling This approach requires a trivially small amount of elisp and a single plugin ([ivy, actually counsel, all of which is confusingly ... 2017-10-15 #emacs #tip
A new experiment So I am trying a new experiment... Thanks to HUGO and ox-hugo there is now a feasibly blogging platform that doesn't take me out of emacs. I am <span class="underline">very</span> bad at blogging. This at least removes a number of barriers (markdown, non-emacs-editor etc.). So, welcome, a... 2017-10-11
mpd, ncmpcdd, perl, CPAN and song ratings on OSX Hi there, been a while - so, buzzword bingo anyone ;-). Having grown tired of the weight and cost of a GUI I am returning to my lighter-weight roots as much as possible. I can't quite reproduce the fantastic experience of i3 on the mac but using terminal based apps is a good first step. So, after experimenting with the excelle ... 2017-02-14 #cli #music #osx #perl #tools
SSH Keys and unRAID I wanted to rsync some data directly to and from my unRAID server. (And yes, the eagle eyed amongst you will remember I moved away from it previously. I'm back, but that's for another post.) The problem is that sshd is a pig about permissions and whilst ... 2016-12-08 #ssh #unraid
Managing dependant projects with lein I strongly believe that ignorance is one of the most powerful tools we should employ when we build software. As a mechanism to enforce de-coupling it is great. What?! Huh?! No, I haven't lost the plot (any more than usual), I simply mean that I strive to build small components that are as ignorant as possible. The opposite of ignorance is knowled ... 2016-12-02 #clojure #dev #lein #maven
NAS fun Fun with NAS's. If you find that a contradiction in terms then you might not be the right audience for this post - all the best :-). I have about 2TB of data that I need to maintain. Some of it is (legally owned) media, some of it are documents, photos, machine backups etc. Having managed ... 2016-11-18 #backup #drivepool #nas #storage
The rotting Apple I don't usually moan publicly as it never does any good and misery likes company. However, I am having a bad day, this is my personal blog and so Apple is the target. When I first started using computers the major contenders were DOS, NextStep or Apple I (or II?). There were also Linux variants such as the venerable twm and fvwm. I think Gnome 1 w ... 2016-11-17 #apple #moan #ux
Adding go-faster stripes to ClojureScript compilation If you are using ClojureScript (and if not, why not? :-)) then I strongly recommend you enable parallel build. I mistakenly thought this meant that it would run separate builds in parallel, but no, it is far cleverer a ... 2016-11-11 #cljs #cljsbuild #clojurescript #dev #tip
Restricting helm and ag to certain files ag is great and searches through your code base in the blink of an eye. Coupled with helm it makes for a great experience finding things. If run in a git project then it helpfully ignores those in your .gitignore file. However, in most projects I have f ... 2016-11-10 #ag #dev #emacs #helm #spacemacs #tip
The power of an abstraction I see a lot of code bases getting into a mess through an inappropriate use of abstraction. Like many things in the Software Engineering industry, it is a tool which is in wide-spread use, learned from poor examples and not particularly well understood. For me, the best definition of an abstraction, and I apologise for not crediting whoever coined ... 2016-11-08 #abstraction #dev
Cancelling an online.net server I have found Online.net great in terms of provisioning time, capability of their UI, customer service etc. (I have also found some not-so-nice things: setup-costs, cannot use your own Windows license, unclear documentation on whether your server can access the RPN etc. but let's not spoil a nice day :-)) Anyway, I needed t ... 2016-10-16 #infrastructure #online.net #servers
Seafile history (NOTE: updated to include images) Another fly-by post. Seafile has a really neat 'history' browser - on the web site you will see a little clock icon when viewing a library. If you click this you can navigate to a point-in-time and then either restore the entire library, a folder or a file from that snapshot. ... 2016-10-09 #seafile
Lost Is it me? Am I getting old and grumpy? Well yes, I am, but that might not be cause. I am watching Lost again, and I am struck again how brilliant it is: the cinematography; the acting; the perfect amount of quirkiness and consistency; the character development and so on. And yet, whilst I am really appreciating watching it I can't help but feel a ... 2016-10-07 #lost #tv
Been a while So.... how have you all been? It has been a worryingly long time since I last saw you all ;-) Life seems to be doing all it can to stop me blogging, so this is 'fly by' blog post to keep me in rhythm. seafile Wow, this is rocking my world big time - it is great. Disappointed there isn't a 'one-way sync TO the server ... 2016-10-06 #blogging #discipline #seafile
Quick update on seafile and plex So I am trying a new experiment... So.... how have you all been? It has been a worryingly long time since I last saw you all ;-) Life seems to be doing all it can to stop me blogging, so this is 'fly by' blog post to keep me in rhythm. seafile Wow, this is rocking my world big time - it is great. Disappointed there ... 2016-10-06
Moving to seafile from pydio About We occasionally need to share sensitive files with our clients: new deployment bundles, test data etc. Due to the sensitive nature of our work we <span class="underline">must</span> have the following: strong usernames/passwords no client installation so a decent web UI is necessary encryption in transit and at rest... 2016-10-01 #cloud #pydio #seafile
Circleci, phantomjs Another quick tip. I use the excellent cljsbuild to compile and test our ClojureScript projects (and I can't believe how difficult it is to wire this stuff together in 2016!). To support continuous integration I use phantomjs to provide the JavaScript environment. Unfortunately ... 2016-09-29 #circleci #cljs #cljsbuild #clojurescript #lein #phantomjs #tip
Circle-ci and phantomjs Another quick tip. I use the excellent cljsbuild to compile and test our ClojureScript projects (and I can't believe how difficult it is to wire this stuff together in 2016!). To support continuous integration I use phantomjs to provide the JavaScript environment. Unfortunat ... 2016-09-29 #clojure #clojurescript #dev
Deprecated warnings from plumatic schema If you aren't already using plumatic's schema then I strongly recommend you do. (when did they stop being 'Prismatic' and become 'Plumatic'? Oh well) The reason why will have to be another blog post, this is simply to say that is you are using both or either then you will get a bunch of deprecated ... 2016-09-29 #cljs #clojure #clojurescript #plumatic #prismatic #schema
Secure file sharing in the cloud We occasionally need to share sensitive files with our clients: new deployment bundles, test data etc. Due to the sensitive nature of our work we must have the following: strong usernames/passwords no client installation so a decent web UI is necessary encryption in transit and at rest ... 2016-09-29 #cloud #pydio #seafile
Keeping project buffers tidy with projectile Projectile is an excellent library for managing 'projects' (where a project is typically a git repository). Today I found a new tip - projectile-kill-buffers which effectively removes the project from your current emacs session: projectile-kill-buffers is an interactive autoloaded compiled Lisp fu ... 2016-09-28 #dev #emacs #projectile #spacemacs
Git tagging your builds automatically I need to write a much longer post to explain my thoughts on 'versioning' and what constitutes a release with today's trends of continuous integration, but for now, a simple tip. I wanted a way to distinguish each build, not each release but each build. There is one excellent source of truth for that which is your git repository. Wouldn't i ... 2016-09-28 #ci #circleci #clojure #dev #lein #tip
Git tagging your builds automatically I need to write a much longer post to explain my thoughts on 'versioning' and what constitutes a release with today's trends of continuous integration, but for now, a simple tip. I wanted a way to distinguish each <span class="underline">build</span>, not each <span class="underline">release</span> but each <span class="underline">build</span>. Th ... 2016-09-27 #dev #git
Lessons learned with Clojure's StackTraces A hard day I learned the following lessons today: Simplest is best Evaluate your assumptions Sometimes development is just hard... 2016-09-26 #clojure #dev
Blogging, hello, *again*! A fresh start So, er yeah. I haven't really blogged for a long time - this time it will be different. I promise. Hmm, I am already sceptical. It is well known that 'trying harder' never works, so what is different this time? Well, I have some objectives which are SMART: Specific Me... 2016-09-25 #broken promises #redemption
Champaigne or printer ink? Be careful - this is an old post and may not work anymore! {.warning} Who knew printer ink was more expensive than champagne?... 2015-09-06 #moan
Bye bye OVH, Hello GitHub pages Be careful - this is an old post and may not work anymore! {.warning} OVH (UK) are great for cheap commodity hardware and VPSes etc. Their web hosting... 2015-09-05 #blog #github #ovh
Relative links in org-mode and Jekyll Be careful - this is an old post and may not work anymore! {.warning} This blog is created by Jekyll however the blog posts are written in the excellent... 2015-09-05 #emacs #faq #jekyll #org-mode
Blogging with jekyll, hexo, emacs and org Be careful - this is an old post and may not work anymore! {.warning} This is really just a moan, move on - there are almost certainly better things to do with your life.... 2015-08-26 #blog #emacs #jekyll #org-mode