«17:34:35»

Another discovery today was the Dat Project, a peer-to-peer protocol that combines the best of git, bittorrent, and Dropbox, to allow you to share and version files of any size. 🗳

«17:16:45»

Cronitor looks like a slick service, designed to monitor and alert you when a cron job fails, when an API is down, or when a pipeline is simply taking too much time. Nifty! 🤖

«13:17:46»

Yesterday I learned about so-called “macro pads”, which are small programmable keyboards about the size of a number pad. People use them to store key macros used in various apps (so that it is one touch to do some action), and there are even ones with little LCD or OLED screens that can be programmed. See the elgato Stream Deck, the Infinitton and the MAX Keyboard Falcon-20 RGB.

«13:09:16»

I love the utility jq from stedolan. It is so useful in day to day terminal activities, that I don’t know what I’d do without it. Even for a super simple task like pretty printing the stdout from some tool (that outputs json in a raw clump), it is useful. theutil | jq

«18:03:30»

TIL about the concept of a warrant canary, with which an org states the absence of any secret gov’t subpoena. For privacy’s sake, I hope it remains legal to state that you have not been served…

«07:38:09»

I’m going to try dotbot for managing my dot files. I really need a quick and easy way to install them on any mac or *nix machine I happen to need to use. 🤖

«07:14:18»

Made by the same fellow, Hasu, who also makes the programmable replacement control board for HHKB keyboards, there’s also his USB to USB Keyboard Converter, which is a USB dongle that you install between your keyboard and your computer. It works to make some keyboards programmable.

«19:39:00»

Hugo, my static site generator of choice, just released version 0.54.0, kompleat with pedantic semver rule compliance. Hopefully this post will generate, because it is getting generated using this fresh, new version. 😅

«14:50:14»

I’ve ordered a cool programmable controller for PFU HHKB Happy Hacking keyboards from Hasu. You can remap the keys, so that no matter what system you connect to, it is set up in your expected configuration. This way, I can use a Japanese HHKB with its arrow keys, as an English keyboard; something PFU does not sell. To go with, I also ordered a replacement English keycap set. I love the Topre switches, but keycap choices are severely limited.

«19:30:08»

Sometimes you need a timestamp in a shell script, for example if you need to calculate the hmac signature for a payload you received from a web service. In Linux or Mac, you can do date -u +"%s" or date -u +"%s.%N" if you need the nanoseconds. Use Gnu gdate from brew on Mac because its stock date does not support %N. The -u tells it to return UTC, which you can leave off for local time. If you need to force a timezone, use something like TZ=":Japan" date +"%s". The result looks like 1548931141 or 1548931220.112871000.

«19:42:51»

Did significant changes to my Keyboardio Model 01 layout, putting the shifts under my pinkies and the backspace at upper left. It is mentally stressful to switch between laptop and the Model 01 and a PFU Happy Hacking Keyboard. See the latest layout.

«11:09:22»

Got word from my ISP that a backup had a bunch of files with suspected malware (uh, why did they suddenly discover it now?!). I deleted the files in the backups, got the list of paths, pasted to Excel, used MID() to extract the file ids, appended double quotes by concatenating char(34), did a transpose to horizontal, copied the row out to an editor, then replaced the spaces with commas. Then, I put that string of id’s in a database query to filter the attachment records and delete them, like In(RecordId(),"1111111","2222222","3333333"). Malware b-gone.

«09:27:46»

My Keyboardio Model 01 surely has some DNA from the Esrille New Keyboard from NISSE. The Esrille is beautiful and ready to support a Japanese layout, but is eye-wateringly expensive, and its firmware is probably not as flexible as the Model 01’s.

«23:39:30»

It’s been a looong time since I soldered anything, but the Helix ortholinear (grid) keyboard kit has my interest piqued. The kits are made and sold by Yushakobo here in Japan, and they recently opened an actual shop in Akihabara too.

«13:31:33»

Apple’s FaceTime has a serious bug that lets people remotely listen in via your mobile’s mic, without your permission. Looks like Apple will fix soon and may have disabled it server-side, but disable just in case. iOS Settings > pull down > search “facetime” > open and toggle off.

«11:56:50»

You can choose which of your keybase folders to sync from the terminal, although kbfs syncs none by default, instead utilizing a space-based cache (seems like Google File Stream). For example you can do: keybase fs sync enable /keybase/public/rickcogley/keep/this/on/my/hdd. Do it, and bask in the power.

«09:37:10»

Have you heard of “Have I Been Pwned”? It’s used by Firefox Monitor and Zetetic Codebook to find out if your email or password has been involved in a security breach.

«09:20:39»

If you’re a Facebook user (hard to justify in light of hard evidence), you should make use of Mozilla Firefox’s “Facebook Container” extension, that prevents Facebook from tracking you around the web. Or, you know, stop using Facebook!

«09:16:46»

Have you heard of the programming language Rust, for “safe systems programming”? It helps prevent common programming mistakes that can lead to security problems.

«20:58:18»

In terms of cables, I like the brand ANKER because their products are sturdy and last well. It’s a bit insulting that Apple makes you buy so many dongles and cables, yet they don’t last.