Posts
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I Think Bluetooth is Finally OK
Bluetooth was introduced on May 7, 1989. I think I first heard of it in the mid-2000’s. People would use it to try to send contact info or other files between feature phones. As I recall, it had about a 50% chance of actually working. All of my attempts fell squarely in the failing 50%. So I ignored it for a few more years.
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My Wireguard Setup
Disclaimer
Someone has been submitting my recent posts to online tech news aggregators, where they are criticized for not being cutting edge or paradigm shifting enough. If you’ve been led to believe that this post awe and amaze you, complain to the person who submitted it, not me. This is just my personal blog where I write about stuff that I’m doing, mostly technology based. It will not change your life. That said…
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version 1.3
Me again, talking about this silly
versionprogram still.Actually, there are some pretty cool updates over the past few point releases. They came fast and on the heels of each other. The idea was posed to use the Linux package manager –
aptorpacmanor whatever – to get data on a program instead of relying on a hard-coded list.Background
After some back and forth I warmed up to the idea, but as a backup to the known program list, not as a replacement. My reasoning is that you might have multiple versions of
Read more...fooinstalled. Maybe one was through the default package manager, one through some download-and-run-an-install-script method. They might get installed to different locations in yourPATH. But when you callfooon the command line, you’ll only get one of them. -
Catalina VM
I’m not a big fan of Apple. Their products themselves are fine, for the most part. Not to my preference in a lot of ways, but that’s fine. I know plenty of people who love their iPhones and Macbooks and watches. I’m not going to argue. I definitely don’t like the company though. I perceive them as being overly controlling, developer hostile, and incredibly narcissistic. All this is just a pretext for saying that I don’t want to spend any money on Apple hardware.
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A Cooler Cooler from Cooler Master
Some weeks ago I shared my new PC build. It’s been wonderful. Working perfectly. One thing I did recently was put in another 500GB drive to hold my VM images. While I was in there, I moved the front mounted drives around to the back and did some better cable arranging.
One thing I had planned to do for a while was add a new CPU cooler. After reading some reviews and watching some Youtube videos, I settled on the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition.
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version 1.0
A while back I posted about a script I wrote called
version.https://github.com/bit101/version
You pass it the name of a program and it tells you what version of that program you have installed. Example:
version java
This saves you from having to remember if it’s
java -v,java --version,java -Vor something else (no spoilers).
Read more...versionnow knows how to get the version of 156 different programs (including itself). It has 9 contributors and 15 stars. Not exactly React, but it’s cool to have people contributing. -
Grep and Sed, Demystified
I’ve kind of half understood
Read more...grepfor a while, but assumed that I didn’t really get it at all. I thought I knew nothing at all aboutsed. I took some time this weekend to sit down and actually learn about these two commands and discovered I already knew a good deal about both of them and filled in some of what I didn’t know pretty easily. Both are a lot more simple and straightforward than I thought they were. -
New Shell Script Shortcut
I’m often making shell scripts for various things – sometimes just a quick one for a specific task, sometimes just to test something out, sometimes for some kind of workflow task that I plan to keep around.
It’s always the same steps:
- Create the file.
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Add the header:
#! /bin/bash - Write the code.
- Save it.
- Exit the editor.
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Make it executable with
chmod +x <filename> - Run, test, edit, etc.
When you’re repeating yourself, time for some automation. So I wrote a shell script that creates shell scripts.
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Git-based Wiki
For many years I’ve bounced around using different tools to save information that I might need later. I’ve used MS OneNote, Evernote, Workflowy, Dynalist, Notion, several other hosted and self-hosted wiki systems, and probably many other things.
If I had to name a favorite out of all those, I’d go with Workflowy. It’s a super simple text outliner. You start with a single top level page. Each page is a list of items, and can each have a nested sub-list, with effectively unlimited depth. But you can also focus on any node so that it becomes a page in itself. Dynalist is very much the same, but you get multiple lists and can add images, fancy formatting, check boxes, all kinds of other groovy features. On the surface it sounds a million times better, but with all those bells and whistles, I felt like I was losing the elegant simplicity of Workflowy.
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Pinebook Pro Tips
For those of you who actually have, or are thinking about getting a Pinebook Pro and would like to know how to avoid the stupid mistakes I made, here are some specific details I learned.
Get the Right Image
I wanted to install the Manjaro XFCE version. So I wanted the image for that. This was my first point of confusion. I knew I wanted an eMMC installer image. There are links here: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=Pinebook_Pro_Software_Release#Manjaro_ARM
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