Blurbs

I learned of bat as a replacement of cat recently and finally decided to update my personal aliases with cat=bat. However, after installing bat with sudo apt install bat the bat command was missing. I installed it but I didn’t know where it was on my system or why it was seemingly missing.

So thanks to this old StackOverflow post I’ve learned to use dpkg -L <package> to find where bat was installed rather than digging through all possible locations manually. It ended up being installed as batcat instead of simply bat for whatever reason, hence why I couldn’t immediately locate it.

I’ve been hearing about uv for awhile but I am happy with poetry for the most part. However, I’ll need to keep an eye on it and consider changing if it continues to mature.

One main reason would be the better build times it provides for development with Docker. This has been an on and off again nuisance in my development.

Production-ready Python Docker Containers with uv hynek.me

Starting with 0.3.0, Astral’s uv brought many great features, including support for cross-platform lock files uv.lock. Together with subsequent fixes, it has become Python’s finest workflow tool for my (non-scientific) use cases. Here’s how I build production-ready containers, as fast as possible.

I just discovered ZoomIt from Microsoft, a tool for making presentations from your screen. It provides some shortcuts to quickly zoom, draw and type on your screen which is helpful for demos or presentations via video calls.

I just thought this writing from Nick Janetakis really lays out a lot of great practices and worth sharing.

I just found Google allows you to compare ISPs by using their own video quality metrics at google.com//get/videoqualityreport. Very cool tool for judging a service provider at least for providing a quality video streaming experience.

I am currently implementing BorgBackup for my NAS to meet the recommended 3-2-1 backup strategy. BorgBackup on its own is just a CLI, and on top of it you can use Borgmatic for easier configuration via yaml files rather than manually scripting all the command line flags. But for my NAS I need to deploy Borgmatic with Docker so I’ll be using this borgmatic-docker repo maintained by the same borgmatic team.

Being 3 layers of abstraction deep while trying to learn a new tool made for a few hiccups and what I found online required a combination of sources to piece all the parts together. While I was writing my own notes to document my setup I found this tutorial. It covers everything I needed and with more detail than my own notes so I recommend it for your own borgmatic setup.

I’m using BorgBase for my backups, BTW.

I saw this post The WiFi Only Works When Its Raining on Hackernews. I think I can say I’ve learned a thing or two working at a WISP for a few years because I knew what the problem was by the title alone.

Can you guess what it is?

At home I’ve been using Neovim on WSL2 but out of the box I could not copy and paste from Windows to Neovim or vice versa. There are a few solutions but I found wsl-clipboard to be incredibly simple and apparently unknown due to lack of stars on the repo.

With Pythons pdb usually q for quit is enough to close the debugger and stop the program. When that’s not working you can follow it with a quick ctrl+c to exit the program. But I got stuck in a loop with a poorly placed breakpoint and I didn’t want to close my terminal or use another terminal to kill it so I learned you can call os._exit() to force the Python program to quit skipping all finally blocks and __exit__ methods.

So for this situation import os; os._exit() force quits pdb and your program.

I enjoy sitting outside at night; often times sit on my computer for personal projects. Being in Vanuatu I can enjoy this perk all year long and it also means I’m much more aware of the sun, moon and other things in the sky I wouldn’t pay much mind to if I spent more nights indoors.

Just now I saw the longest shooting star I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve seen many. From my current vantage, it appeared dead west a tad north of where the sun sets about 15 - 25 degree above the horizon and traveled north across the sky while never really appearing to lose much altitude. I could not say why but it flew towards the northern horizon where it fell out my view 20 - 30 seconds after I spotted it. I comptiplated taking a video but never knew if I would have the time to record it so I didn’t. Anyways, it flashed a couple times and grew in light intensity too a couple times but did not burn out which seems unusual also given its duration in the sky.

I’m curious if there is a website that collects known space debris and meteorites so I can read about what I saw.

This project template, Vite Vue Ultimate Starter has been awesome. I’ve used it for one project and I am beginning a new project with it now.

Given the JS ecosystem, I am aware this post is likely to be outdated before I publish this 🤷.

Living on the ring of fire I’ve had my share of earthquakes and we believe generally we think of them as coming without warning. But, I begun noticing earthquakes of 5-point-something or more often have a deep, wide rumble announcing their approach just a couple seconds ahead of the quake. I perceive the rumble to come rushing towards me (if that makes sense), then at its crescendo the quake begins. The otherwordly sound fills the sky as if coming from everywhere at once but it feels as if it is approaching too. A true reminder of how small you are compared to the earth below your feet.

Recently, I’ve been quick enough to recognize this sound as a warning, “an earthquake is coming”, I would say. It felt like a super power the first time I predicted an earthquake and then I decided to lookup online the science behind the sound I was hearing. Surprisingly, there was not much about it online and I’m not sure why, I know what I hear and I know its real after hearing it several times. I even had this conversation with a friend and she too confirmed the same sound in her experience. Perhaps there’s something unique to living on a small island and the interaction between the ocean and the earthquake that produces the rumble, making for a rare effect?

It’s also helpful to know that sometimes dogs, cats and other animals go wild before an earthquake and this phenomenon is much more documented and usually gives you more warning.