Turn the radio volume down for adverts and DJs talking
A script for automatically lowering the volume during radio advertisements and DJ announcements and turns the volume back up when songs are playing. It controls a Sonos speaker using the Soco-cli P…
iOS Ships Dvorak, Finally
I’m a huge fan of the Dvorak keyboard layout, but if there’s one thing I love more than “Evolved vs Engineered” solution debates, is that nothing wins the ”standardized” debate.
Tools for thought as cultural practices, not computational objects
On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens
PDF processing and analysis with open-source tools (2021)
This post is an attempt to bring together my go-to open-source PDF analysis and processing tools and commands for a variety of common tasks.
Using email wrong
If you don’t like email, try a different strategy.
Setting up my new laptop: Nix style
Brian McGee's personal profile and blog
My Notebook System
This year is going to see my journal/log’s 10th anniversary and 100th notebook. (Update: 10 years reached 2022-03-31, 100th notebook 2022-07-28.) After many attempts to write this up, I’m just going to disgorge it all. This article is long and rambling and I make no apology for it. Feel free to skip around to any part…
My next main browser: a review of Orion
Orion is currently my favourite browser, and has replaced Safari entirely on one of my primary Macs. Here's why.
Speeding up this site by 50x (2014)
I've seen all these studies that show how a 100ms improvement in page load time has a significant effect on page views, conversion rate, etc., but I'd never actually tried to optimize my site. This blog is a static Octopress site, hosted on GitHub Pages. Static sites are supposed to be fast, and GitHub Pages uses…
How to use your DSLR from 2008 as a webcam in 2022 (NixOS)
Why throw away your old Camera? In this guide we'll show you how simple it is to reuse your old Camera as a webcam using the NixOS linux distribution.
Use fzf for tmux session switching
https://youtu.be/DkJ9rb85LC0
Go’s Version Control History
Every once in a while someone notices the first commit in the Go repo is dated 1972:
Speeding up VSCode extensions in 2022
I was curious to know if the functionality of VSCode can catch up with the native speed of some editors, such as Sublime. That led me to seek out where some bottlenecks may be and where time is being spent. In this post I look at both the internals and extensions.
How to Stop Procrastinating on Your Goals by Using the “Seinfeld Strategy”
Don't break the chain.
Markdown, Asciidoc, or reStructuredText – a tale of docs-as-code
Who writes the developer documentation for your product? During the early days of my tech career, I worked on a database replication product at IBM. My immediate team had developers and testers but not a single technical writer. I can speak for myself when I say that I never bothered to know who keeps writing the…
The definitive guide that you never wanted: Backpack fabrics (2017)
As you’re reading through our reviews or researching the best backpacks yourself, you may see a profusion of various technical terms being…
The time has come to replace file systems
The time has come to replace file systems!
Tracking Everything I Wore For 1 Year
Semi-Automated Clothes Tracker using NFC Buttons
A Twitter Off Ramp: A Tutorial for Getting on Mastodon
A tutorial for getting on Mastodon
-h –Help -help Help –? –?
-h --help -help help --? -? ????
Midnight Commander Tips and Tricks
A good tutorial can be found at Midnight Commander Guide . There is a mail list for MC in which you can ask questions and share tips: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/mc/ . There at least a half-dozen of entry level tutorial for Mc on the Web including several YouTube videos (just search for Midnight commander on…
How to set up a blog with Hugo and Cloudflare, and why you should
The internet is not as good as it used to be. Information is siloed into walled gardens like Facebook, Nextdoor, and so on. Google results are saturated with SEO spam. Wordpress is a mess that keeps on chugging through inertia; Medium, while clean, is behind a paywall; Reddit and Twitter are increasingly hiding their…
My Preferred Smart Home Vendors
A non-exhaustive list of smart home devices that work well with Home Assistant
Digital Gardening
A website is a lot like a garden.
Purchasing Power Parity: Fair pricing for SaaS products
Developer, writer, indie hacker · 📍 Montreal, QC