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 […]
Articles
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 […]
Gutenberg can do that!
A new editor is coming to WordPress, the project code name is Gutenberg but at some point it will be just the WordPress editor, for now it is referred to as Gutenberg or the Gutenberg editor. The focus of this article is on some of the new features you can do with Gutenberg. If you […]
Code Syntax Highlighting in Gutenberg
I’ve developed a WordPress plugin which extends the core Gutenberg code block adding color syntax highlighting. If you are using Gutenberg to display code and want some color, install and check it out. It is available at github.com/mkaz/code-syntax-block. I initially started to build as a separate block, but that introduced the issue of converting existing […]
Beyond Ad Blocking
Ad blockers are one way to make the internet a slightly nicer place. However, more can be done, especially when it comes to helping yourself from making bad decisions, like reading the comments. First, you need a browser extension which allows you to run your own CSS. The most popular is probably Stylish which has […]
Reading List 2017
A look back at what I read in 2017, broken into the top fiction and non-fiction books, see previous years 2015, and 2016. You can see my Goodreads Year in Books 2017 for the complete list. I set out with the goal to read 25 books in the year and ended up one book short […]
Running Stats 2017
A year in review for my running in 2017, see previous years 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, and 2016. 2017 was a good year of running, not quite as consistent at beginning and end, but good training in the middle for the Redwood City OktobeRun half-marathon, which I posted my best time in many years. […]
Book Review: Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath is an American classic by John Steinbeck written in 1939 about the great depression and a Oklahoma family who lost their farm and packed everything up to try to make a new life for themselves in California. I’m sure I read the novel in high school or at some point, but […]
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 […]
Unix is my IDE
An integrated development environment (IDE) such as PHPStorm, Eclipse or Netbeans provides a set of tools and integrations available together to make development easier. Common features are: Text Editor Project search and replace Automatic building, testing, linting Source control integration The command-line meets all of these features. Editor First, my text editor is vim. I […]
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 […]