Paper always beats rock and scissors. Because one of the few inventions greater than writing itself, is writing on paper. Paper writings are absolute, self-contained and transferable units of knowledge, which after publishing become and stay available and accessible for hundreds of years or more. Don’t take my word for it, there is this great quote by J.C.R. Licklider found in Libraries of the Future and brought to my attention… Read More »Can we replace paper?
Advent of Code is a yearly programming contest created by Eric Wastl and it is currently being held at adventofcode.com. That means that this site spawns two daily programming challenges — until Christmas — to see who can solve them the fastest. But it is not just about being fast, Advent of Code is also a great way to improve your programming skills with daily puzzles or learn a new… Read More »Advent of Code
This week my Pi stopped working. After hooking up a monitor I saw kernel errors related to VFS. So the file system was obviously broken. Oops. The end conclusion is that the SD card is physically ‘broken’, but I still managed to salvage my data — which is more important than the card. Here’s how. Broken file system: fsck or dd? What didn’t work for me, but you might want… Read More »Save data from your broken Raspberry Pi SD card with GNU ddrescue
When a co-worker handed me a copy of The Phoenix Project, the 8-bit art on the cover looked fun. But the tagline — ‘A Novel About IT, DevOps and Helping your Business Win’ — sounded a bit like the usual buzzword management lingo. But I was clearly wrong, I loved this book! It is unlike anything I’ve read before and it really spoke to me because the situations were so… Read More »The Phoenix Project
This is a list, in no particular order, of principles to adhere when running a secure Linux server. SSH – Never allow direct SSH root access (set PermitRootLogin No). SSH – Do not use SSH keys without a passphrase. SSH – If possible, do not run SSH on a public IP interface (preferably use a management VLAN). SSH/SSL – Use strong SSH ciphers and MAC algorithms (Check with https://testssl.sh/). Never… Read More »Linux server principles
Most people know sort and uniq (or even diff) and usually use a mix of these tools when comparing two files. However sometimes, there is a shorter solution than piping different commands together: comm is your answer! The comm(1) command is one of the most powerful but also underused text tools in the coreutils package. Comm’s manpage description is as simple as it gets: “compare two sorted files line by line”. … Read More »GNU coreutils comm is amazing
The following lines are in my .vimrc file and make working with Vim all the better! I keep it pretty basic, so I don’t use the very popular fugitive.vim or NERDTree plugin.Put these lines in ~/.vimrc or /etc/vim/vimrc (depending on your distro, sometimes they are already there but need to be uncommented), and you’re good to go. As for a font, I like the Liberation Mono font (11pt). Explanation :command… Read More »My Vim setup
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder is one of those books that always seems to pop up when ‘computer-people’ share book recommendations. Exhibit A, exhibit B, exhibit C and so on — you get the picture. Also the “Winner of the Pulitzer Price” notion on the cover seemed promising, and it was about computers, and I like computers! So I had to read it. I had assumed it was… Read More »The Soul of a New Machine – Tracy Kidder
Here’s a chronological list of some of the physical things/tools/gadgets I bought in 2017. Physical as in, I’m leaving out experiences, books and cryptocoins. Here we go. The Sony MDR-ZX110 headphones are decent aka good enough for my use, but more importantly also cheap enough so I don’t have to worry when I break them, which will eventually happen sooner or later. Which is mostly sooner in my experience with… Read More »Favorite 2017 purchases
This post is for myself, two weeks ago. I needed something like this. Or, maybe it’s for you? You know a little bit of Python, kind of understand the MVC concept and have a clear understanding of RDBMS? Congratulations, you will have no trouble getting something up and running in Django in a couple of minutes. Whether you need to move a database to an editable, shareable environment for less… Read More »Django in 10 minutes
This book by Ashlee Vance sat on my wish-list since it came out two years ago. So, long overdue, last week I finally got to it and boy, what a ‘fantastic‘ read it is. There is lot to say about the man, his ideas and the ways he goes about bringing those ideas to life. Whether you like stories about next-level entrepreneurship or bold boyish imagination about where we are moving… Read More »Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
Hacker News is pretty much my goto site and sometimes I submit links or take part in the discussion. However when I recently tried to get a list of the links I submitted ordered by Hacker News score, I noticed this is not implemented on the site itself (as far as I can tell?). However Hacker News wouldn’t be Hacker News if they didn’t provide an API and access to… Read More »Hacker News: sort user submissions by score