While I was in Airport, I had a time limit on my Wifi which I used up too fast. So now all I’ve got on my mind is the challenge of getting back onto the internet. Who limits Wifi anyway? What are we? Savages? In this case I didn’t have to do much because I had a snippet of code I took from my old workmate Steve Purcell. It’s sole purpose is to generate a random Mac address, and make that callable from the zsh shell. Read more

In the *nix ecosystem, there are a lot of tools that are great to chain together. I’d encourage everyone to learn their tools, but sometimes the tools are complex, and you only want to do something simple. I keep forgetting how to crypto. What I generally want to do is encrypt and sign a directory, then pull that same directory later. Here’s the script I threw together today. It takes one argument, either a directory to encrypt, or a gnupg encrypted tar gzipped directory and extracts it. Read more

Sometimes your central git repository goes down, but you need to share code. That’s a bummer, you can commit and wait, but you’ve likely heard that you shouldn’t need to rely on a central repo. So you’ve got a few options here: Mirror your repo someplace else and switch upstreams during outages, email your stuff as patches using git am, setup a small read only local git server and pull between neighbours, Read more

In a browser you markup for links. A wiki builds on this behavior to describes topics, linking nouns to pages in context that link to other nown pages. Browsing a wiki allows you to dive into information and build up your mental model of a subject area– which is kind of addictive. So why can’t we do the same thing in our code? Code has syntax which are just links between files. Read more

You might also be interested in the Linux Adventure Prequel post. Lets say you want to install things on a Gentoo distro, but you have no network? Perhaps you want to install something novel, like a network, but need a network to get a network. I am currently without a linux box and I don’t want to understand everything about my package manager just yet. The most lightweight way I know would be to just run up a Docker image with a mounting to a folder on the desktop. Read more

Even amongst nerds, it’s hard to find someone who wants Linux on a desktop. Perhaps that’s because stuff got hard, everything changed. EFI Crypto boot, new fangled window managers, systemd, no onboard networking and still terrible wifi driver support. It’s pants really: to get drivers you need a network, to get network you need drivers or a plug in supported thing. I’m motivated because I miss my tiling window manager, and I miss the choice I got. Read more

For years I used the name “Daemons Advocate”. I don’t know why, but at some stage I stopped liking it. This got tricky, anytime I get to know a name I start to dislike it. Picking a handle is too hard. And everything I came up with is taken by some other schmo on the internets because if you’re looking for a good short name in 2016, you’re way late to the party. Read more