A fruit tree planted in a nice sunny spot, given water and time will grow. It may not grow how you want or expect it to, but grow it will. Each branch of the tree does it’s job and sprouts new branches. All of them competing for sun, getting in each others way, and shooting […]
Category: Misc
Switching from Ubuntu to Manjaro
I surprised myself switching off of Ubuntu to Manjaro for my primary computers. I’ve been a user of Ubuntu for many years. It is a wonderful desktop platform. Ubuntu made Linux on the desktop easier by having a straight-forward installation, including necessary drivers, and creating an OS to compete with the Windows and Mac duopoly. […]
The Story of the Laggy Mouse
A story as old as time, not all the stories involve computers and peripherals, but the tale is known by all do-it-your-selfers, home-depot-excursioners, and other fixers-of-small-things. It is a story told around camp fires, in fact one version of the story starts “So we were out of firewood…” My version starts with “So my mouse […]
Using Firefox user.js settings file
The Firefox user.js file stores user settings, the file is loaded each time Firefox starts. This a convenient way to save your browser customizations and apply them on different machines. The prefs.js file already exists in your Firefox profile directory, find the location using about:support in the top bar. The prefs.js file looks like it […]
Summer Sabbatical
My company, Automattic, has the wonderful perk of a 3-month sabbatical every 5 years. Amazingly enough, I’m already an old-timer and been there over 5-years, so this summer I took my sabbatical. I timed it to be off the same time as the kids for summer, so I didn’t work for June, July, and August. […]
Ethernet, FTW!
I’ve been interested in running a caching DNS server off my Raspberry Pi for awhile, and with the recent Cloudflare announcement of their new DNS service and discussion around it, seemed like a good time to set it up. Pi-hole I setup my device with Pi-hole a great bit of software which was easy to […]
Terminal Heatmap Chart
Awhile ago I created a simple script to create bar charts on the command-line for when I published my running year in review, 2017 example here. I published the script on Github and surprisingly have received a few contributors over the years, recently a couple of students from Greece did a nice upgrade to numerous […]
Automate deleting your tweets with a Raspberry Pi
I’m a tweet deleter. I do not think of Twitter as a great archive of knowledge but more a mere feed and notification system. It is basically an internet wide RSS feed, so no need to treat anything in it too preciously. Delete away everyone. I’ve written a couple of one off scripts previously to […]
Esperanto
Esperanto is a constructed language. It was created in 1887 by a Polish-Jewish doctor L.L. Zamenhof as an easy language to learn. His goal was to foster harmony between people from different cultures and countries; a lingua franca for the world. “The place where I was born … the inhabitants were divided into four distinct […]
Podcasts, Authenticity and Old Media
Modern times seem to opt more for authenticity and rejecting the overly refined, polished, and fake. You see this in the popularity of Reality TV and social media, both have the appeal of non-scripted and authentic content. I also see this desire in podcasts. I’m a bit of a podcast junkie, I’ve been listening for […]
On Social Media
Unfortunately there is no better way to publish photos, writing, or other personal content without using social media. The corollary is also true, there is no better way to follow content from someone you are interested in than using social media. The open web and RSS were not successful enough to escape out of the […]
Voice is the future and Google is best
Almost a year ago, I was lucky enough to be given an Amazon Echo from someone whose family wasn’t that comfortable with an always-on device listening to them, so he gave it to me to play with. My life is quite boring, listen away devices. So my family likes the Echo, it works well enough […]