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Application-Level Logging Best Practices
Logs from the application level are the only way your application talks back to you. Having proper logs with commendable search capabilities is like having a torch in a dark room.
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The Lost Key of QWERTY (2016)
A typography blog about the history of wide sentence spacing, aka "how many spaces after a period between sentences".
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The hard part in becoming a command line wizard
I've long been impressed by shell one-liners. They seem like magical incantations. Pipe a few terse commands together, et voilà! Out pops the solution to a problem that would seem to require pages of code. Are these one-liners real or mythology? To some extent, they're both. Below I'll give a famous real example. Then…
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Home 3D metal printing: first results
A couple of weeks ago I learnt about an interesting 3d metal printing process , from a company selling it for $100k USD, and speculated that it might be DIY-able for much less. Well I now have some promising first results.
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I lost my data trying to back it up
This is a story about how I lost my data when trying to prevent it by backing it up.
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Rsync, GUIs, power, control, design, and decisions
I spent last weekend making a GUI for rsync (and this past week tidying it up a bit) and I learned a lot about rsync, GUIs, design, power, control, and decisions around verbosity and freedom of choice versus simplicity and guidance/support, packaging, maintenance and support.
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Tract: A Hugo theme for ambitious documentation projects
Hello! I wanted to tell you all about an open source project I’m working on that I’m pretty excited about. It’s called Tract and it’s a Hugo theme for large documentation projects. I aim to release version 0.1.0 by the end of 2019. In the meantime, check out the current home page or a sample docs page .
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Building Standalone Python Applications with PyOxidizer
Python application distribution is generally considered an unsolved problem. At their PyCon 2019 keynote talk, Russel Keith-Magee identified code distribution as a potential black swan - an existential threat for longevity - for Python. In their words, Python hasn't ever had a consistent story for how I give my code…
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A Quick and Easy Guide to Tmux (2015)
Become a master of tmux in a few minutes
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My New Favorite Tool for Reviewing PDFs: Okular
Harris Kenny, founder of OutboundSync. A little ode to a computing journey.
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From Google Analytics to Fathom
tl;dr: I'm now using Fathom for my personal website analytics, and it's easy to self-host and maintain, better for privacy, and can lead to better site performance. Since the mid-2000s, right after it became available, I started using Google Analytics for almost every website I built (whether it be mine or someone…
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Tracking Blood Sugar
Fasting glucose and A1C tests done over the past few years show me at low risk for diabetes. But these tests don’t necessarily capture how much blood sugar “spikes” after meals–something that may be a better predictor of disease risk . Such blood sugar spikes can be minimized with a suitable diet, but what that diet…
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Using Web Technologies to Print a Book
From Markdown to PDF via HTML and CSS.
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Personal Kanban 101
Despite our best intentions, life has a way of becoming complicated. People, tasks, responsibilities, deadlines, and even recreation all compete for our attention. The human brain however, simply does not respond well to the stress of juggling multiple priorities. That’s where Personal Kanban can help.
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Slack will never replace email
Hello Mr Butterfield,
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My OpenStreetMap Workflow: Mapping the Village of Marmari, Evia
A general OpenStreetMap editing workflow, with the example of Mapping the village of Marmari, Evia in Greece (Μαρμάρι, Εύβοια).
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Making Git and Jupyter Notebooks play nice
Summary: jq rocks for speedy JSON mangling. Use it to make powerful git clean filters, e.g. when stripping out unwanted cached-data from Jupyter notebooks. You can find the documentation of git 'clean' and 'smudge' filters buried in the page on git-attributes , or see my example setup below.
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App Analysis: Air Canada
This blog series focuses on the collection of device data by various popular mobile apps. Data is often collected in the name of advertising, error monitoring, fraud detection, and social media integration.
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Don’t underestimate grep-based code scanning
Static analysis tools (SAST) are perhaps the most common tool for an AppSec team in the endless effort to move security to the left. They can be integrated into development pipelines in order to of…
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Avoiding Webscraping Throttling Using Python and Tor as a Proxy
In order to hide your IP address and to try and limit throttling when web scraping, it might be a good idea to use a proxy such as Tor. This post describes how to use Python based web scraping tools and Tor to hide yourself when scraping websites for data. However, it can also be used more broadly when using Python to…
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How to Automatically Backup a Linux VPS to a Separate Cloud Storage Service
A walkthrough for backing up a Linux server to an external storage provider like Amazon S3 automatically.
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If you must run Windows 10
Barring divine intervention, Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019 ( formerly LTSB ) may be the least bad option:
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Goodbye Docker: Purging Is Such Sweet Sorrow
This was triggered by a recurring incident I faced where the Docker daemon was using 100% CPU on multiple cores that made the host effectively unusable.
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The Essential Tools of Scientific Machine Learning
Scientific machine learning is a burgeoning discipline which blends scientific computing and machine learning. Traditionally, scientific computing focuses on large-scale mechanistic models, usually differential equations, that are derived from scientific laws that simplified and explained phenomena. On the other hand…
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How and why I transitioned to Linux, and how you can too
First published Jan. 17, 2019; updated Nov. 15, 2019 Let me briefly tell my Linux story. If you're thinking about moving to Linux, and wondering how you'd do so, it might give you some pointers and inspiration. The back story My first introduction to the command line was in the 80s when I f
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Automatic categorization of text is a core tool now
Get ready for medium data
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