Forwarding a Vagrant-based Jekyll dev server to its host
Forwarding port 80 or 22 from Vagrant virtual machines to their host system is fairly simple. Piping non-privileged ports outside the VM–from, say, a develo...
Linux
Changing a hostname in Debian seems harder than necessary
Changing a host’s name in Debian1 is a two-step process, and there doesn’t appear to be a more direct method. This seems odd to me, somehow. Because I stum...
It’s not DNS; it was DNS
Logging in to a VPN shouldn’t cause DNS to stop working, right? Well, you’d like to think that, wouldn’t ya? And the problem wasn’t PEBKAC this time, eithe...
Shrinking a VirtualBox disk
Can you shrink VirtualBox disk images? It turns out you can, with the right setup. A recent cleanup operation led me to one way to get this particular set ...
Become-ing a user securely in Ansible
Using become_user in Ansible requires the acl package to be installed on the remote host. This is a note to my future self, reminding me of the error, the r...
Resizing the disk on a Vagrant virtual machine
When creating a Vagrant VM, one gets a pre-determined VM disk size. While this is more than enough in most use cases, sometimes it isn’t enough for what one...
Avoiding Ansible apt_key on Debian
The apt_key Ansible module has been deprecated and there isn’t a drop-in replacement. There is a workaround available which achieves the same result but req...
Using a Garmin Edge 530 head unit with Linux
As a Linux user, getting commodity devices like GPS head units to play nicely can be hard. This is why I was particularly happy to find out that Garmin devi...
Resurrecting tmux sessions after restart
Have you ever wished your tmux sessions could magically spring back to life after having had to restart your computer? With tmux-resurrect, they can.
Unnecessary upload evasion with lftp mirrors
I’ve been using lftp’s reverse mirror feature for years to upload files to this blog. I’d never worked out how to avoid repeated file uploads. Until now.
Correcting iBus/X-Windows compose key conflicts
Did you know that iBus can cause the compose key to stop working in X-Windows on Linux? I didn’t either. The solution in my situation: if in doubt, leave i...
Bash-ing our way to a project’s base directory
Do you want your script to be told where it needs to run? Or would you rather it work things out for itself? Personally, I find the more a script can work ...
Adventures in collating text in Linux, Docker and Postgres
It’s interesting how bugs can lead to a deeper understanding of how computer systems work. It’s also amazing how nuanced some technical topics can be. For i...
Backing up photos from Android to Debian
One would think that since Android is a Linux-based operating system, that integration between Android devices and Linux computers would work rather seamless...
ssh, tmux and vim: A Simple Yet Effective Pair Programming Setup
At my work, Drift+Noise, we try to use Agile software development methods where possible. For instance, we use TDD largely for our unit tests, BDD for funct...
Fixing ‘cache resources exhausted’ errors in imview
imview is a handy image viewing application for Linux. I’ve started using this at $work recently, because Eye of Gnome, a.k.a eog, (my usual go-to applicati...
The Trick with Perl6 and Linux: Staying Composed
During Andrew Shitov’s talk about Perl6 one-liners at the recent German Perl Workshop in Munich I followed along on the Perl6 REPL trying out the examples as...
Controlling screen brightness via ACPI
Really, this is just a workaround for an issue I haven’t completely understood. Nevertheless, since I had to work out how I’d handled brightness control via...
Processing files with spaces in filenames
Sometimes I get files from friends who use certain graphical operating systems, where it’s ok to use spaces in filenames. Processing these files on Unix isn...