Many years ago I’ve written somewhat similar piece about navigating all the distractions of my life. You can read it here: https://marcin.cylke.com.pl/2016/07/24/it-minimalist/ Years have passed, and I want to revisit the topic. Let this post be a reflection on how my habits changed, but also a summary of techniques that work for me right now. Let’s try to recap my stats for this day, as compared to year 2016 (noted in brackets) ...
An example illustration This article is inspired by a post I’ve stumbled upon on LinkedIn, by Guido Appenzeller Below you can find a reinterpretation of his post. With added details here, and there. The reason for that, is twofold - a) I really like the workflow, b) the original post is missing some details for a first-time user of those tools. ...
I came across this idea of better search in Obsidian notes: https://simplyexplained.com/blog/how-i-use-alfred-to-search-obsidian-notes/ This should work nicely, but: it would require installing an additional tool Alfred, would bind even more to MacOS ecosystem - what if I want to use the same workflow on Linux, would not be too VCS friendly - hard to version those UI wizards So I’ve figured I can do better, with just CLI tools. That resulted in the following short script: ...
An influencer cooking a meal I really like watching some culinary channels on Youtube. Those can be roughly divided into two categories: people cooking some specific recipe people doing a review of a restaurant or a bunch of them It’s nice to watch, but after that not too much I can keep from that. If I like a specific recipe, and I’d like to cook that think it’s really counter productive to try cooking from the video. I’d constantly need to pause, rewind, replay specific fragments. ...
Pocket is a nice service. It can save articles from the web for you to read later. Nice. It can even help in bypassing annoying paywalls (more on this here). With the ease of using it, I can quickly end up with a substantial backlog of articles to go through. Since reading long articles on a screen feels like a chore, I came up with the idea of exporting articles into EPub format and reading them on an e-reader. ...
Disclaimer: This blogpost is not about a specific book, titled Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency. It’s just about execution traces. I wanted to explore a few techniques for visualising inter-dependencies between fragments of code, modules, etc. Say, you have multiple functions and you want to get some bearing on how much each execution of each of those functions takes. Or you have a complicated system, and you’d like to plot remote calls in this system. ...
If you deploy to cloud, ideally you should be able to analyze and debug your system using observability tools. There should be no need to log in to your hosts directly. But life is life, and there might be issues with this or that, and to debug them, direct access to a host is just much easier. Instead of doing a long sequence of clicks through your WebUI in AWS console, you can also access your host with a script. ...
Author: IdeogramAI Prompt: The image shows a typical Google Takeout interface with a large error message indicating that the service is unavailable. In the background, there are frustrated users trying to download their data with unsuccessful attempts, represented by repeated “Failed” and “Retry” notifications. My current data setup is centered around Google Cloud as a place where I store my data. That’s also related to how I use the whole vendor ecosystem. ...
Prompt: generate an image for blogpost titled “Moving markdown files to confluence” Assume you want to have your documentation close to the code. Ideally in your project’s repo. But then there’s always this request, that other people might want to look through that documentation, they’re not too tech savy, no nothing about Git. A few past companies I’ve worked for have had their internal wikis built on Atlassian Confluence. It seems there’s quite nice way to upload pages stored in repository to arbitrary location in Confluence. ...
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“source: Dall-E, prompt: generate an image for blogpost titled “breaking a paywall”, about exploiting newssite paywall using browser extension” Today’s internet is progressively becoming more and more hostile. It is actually a bunch of walled gardens, in the form of Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, all the other social media outlets. Now, also news sites are increasingly becoming a payed instances. I totally get it, authoring all that content is not cheap. If I want to read quality content, I also want authors to be paid adequately. That’s totally fine, and I’m paying for a myriad of news-related sites that are out there. ...
I’ve already written a short post about me using fzf on this blog. And I still use it, it still is awesome! :) But there are more tools like that. Maybe this is just my optics, but with the recent (at least 2 last years) rust’s rise to popularity, there are a lot of small tools doing a single task, or focusing on specific kind of problems. And they of course target terminals! Because it’s obvious you can do many things on the web, but terminals are way cooler, and way more useful if you stick to them for the majority of your workflow. ...
The organization I work in, has this practice of annotating commit messages with ticket numbers. From what I know this tends to be quite a common them all around the IT industry. It serves the purpose of accountability for future checks, current information for others on what the commit is actually about, etc. There may be many more things to add here - as an adventage of such a Some time ago I’ve started using this small snippet of code as my pre-commit hook. It’s main purpose is to free me from remembering or checking which JIRA ticket should I prepend to my Git message. ...
What is fzf? How could I’ve lived without it for so long?! It’s just a pretty little fuzzy search tool, written in go. You can find it here: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf Important features fuzzy search in a list of lines - thanks to that, it’s really easy to find something in a considerably big list of items it’s blazingly fast! very nice shell integrations many additional features - like preview for files (go here to see examples: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf#preview-window) Usages shell history my git-commit message script various CLI python tools, using this wrapper https://github.com/nk412/pyfzf Browsing through shell history This is simply the most useful feature for me. Previously, I’ve extensively used ctrl+r to search through the past commands, but doing this with fzf is much more powerful! ...
I have a fondness for all the retro things in tech, and try to hone this when I have time with exploring old tech. This time I tried running one of the retro consoles’ emulators. I chose Nintendo Gamecube - because of many reasons, but one of them being I own a quite recent incarnation of the Nintendo spirit, namely Nintendo Switch. So with the older one I’ve wanted to see how the games look like back than and how much the landscape of gaming on Nintendo has changed with that big of an age gap. ...
Recently I’ve started using new window manager. Since I’ve always wanted to try some kind of tiling window manager I thought that a fresh installation of an OS on a new machine is good time to have a go at that. From the multitude of possibilities I’ve chosen AwesomeWM. It’s reasonable enough in its standard configuration so I’ve decided to stick with it at least for the time being. In fact the only important feature I look for in a tiling window manager is the tiling behavior. All the other features are somewhat… uninteresting. Even more’ the multitude of config options is rather too much for me as I don’t want to focus on configuring my work environment. ...
Modern open source operating systems vs modern software development practices The reason to write this blog post was a presentation I watched some time ago, and commented on it on Twitter: One of the slides from the presentation. How can you develop an operating system and follow *that* kind of process?! :sadpanda: pic.twitter.com/3XuHMXc0My — Marcin Cylke (@zygm0nt) January 5, 2020 So to be specific - the whole presentation was rather negative towards security model used along OpenBSD development. The presentation itself took a lot of time to go over recent security issues, false claims, etc. ...
Though somewhat strange I happen to come to a need of having a plot of dates that a particular dataset is available on. Doing my exploration in Jupyter notebook it just felt pretty natural to have it written in Python and generated as a graph, with matplotlib. This resulted in a visually appealing description of the dataset. Also, due to the ease of change, I could modify the plot to show additional elements. Although adding more and more, it started to look weirdly confusing, with the need of legend, more insight into it, etc. ...
I tend to not do backups. I used to but just didn’t like it. I wasn’t diligent enough, didn’t have a routine setup. It all felt fragile and error prone in the end. So I stopped. You probably wonder when this will actually hit me - I sometimes do, too. But the truth is I do have backups. I just don’t keep them by myself, I delegate. ...