I keep a daily journal. And journaling daily make pocket planners usable as journal notebooks. I tend to be particular about certain things. So when searching for a new notebook — one that I will carry around for a year — I decided the following things are important. Must haves A5 format. Everything else is too big or too small. Hardcover. No flappy stuff. Lined paper Not too wide or… Read More »The perfect notebook
foster/ˈfɒstə/verb 1. Encourage the development of (something, especially something desirable). “the teacher’s task is to foster learning” TLDR: I made a personal bookshelf management web application and named it Foster and you can find it here. Here’s what I did — with gifs–, so you might build your own. Name I named it Foster. Because of *this* blog post — it accompanies the application, so it’s self-referential. And also, because… Read More »Foster: how to build your own bookshelf management web application
If you have set up your database tables correctly you might be using double-precision floating numbers to store currency values. This works great because dollars use dots to represent decimals. The problem starts when it’s not actually dollars you are storing but euros, and maybe you need to copy query output to Excel or LibreOffice Calc to work with these Euro values. Both of these spreadsheet programs don’t know how… Read More »Use PostgreSQL REPLACE() to replace dots with commas (dollar to euro)
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
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
RSS. It’s kind of a weird acronym and people can’t even seem to agree on the true meaning behind those three letters. It doesn’t sound too sexy, but it does sort of have a recognisable logo. If you have seen this logo before and wondered what it is, well, this post is for you! TL:DR: RSS is a specification that will allow you to keep track of all your favourite sites in… Read More »I still love RSS (you can too!)
You may notice something different on your favourite blog. Left of the URL in the address bar there is a little green lock! This means piks.nl is now served to you via SSL/TLS. You know, https:// instead of http://. This means the connection, and therefore, traffic between you and the website is more secure, because it is encrypted. This was way overdue, even more so because it’s oh so easy now with Let’s Encrypt. Let’s… Read More »Let’s encrypt all the things!