Nifty tidbits!

Azure VM - start/stop using automation

27 Jan, 2017 automation azure

So this is just sharing my long time azure automation script to start/stop a vm. I have this on a schedule so it starts on weekdays in the morning and is shutdown in the evening. There’s also a couple of webhooks so I can start/shutdown using my phone. The latest addition is integrating push notifications to my phone - I have a Pushover which offers a nice api to send push notifications to your devices.

Syncthing - run your own sync server

26 Jan, 2017 cloud-storage Tips Utilities

What I’m after I’m trying out syncthing - I’ve become frustrated that none of the other options seem to tick all the boxes of my needs. Here’s what I need and it doesn’t seem that I’m asking for a lot here: Bi directional file syncing Security & privacy - at rest and in motion Windows client Linux desktop client Android client.

Zsh constantly crashes on Msys64

26 Jan, 2017 Linux shell zsh

So, I wanted to try out Zsh as a bash replacement after using it on and off. Now I don’t write a lot of scripts - but mostly for running apps etc. The only real improvement that I needed was cross shell history… I can never remember where I typed a command and hitting Ctrl-R and finding the command is super nice. On my msys64 install, did a pacman -Su zsh and zsh was installed.

Posix compatible PTY in Windows

24 Jan, 2017 Linux shell windows

Get a real Posix compatible PTY in Windows If you do any work on hte console in WIndows and are not on Windows 10, then you should probably use Conemu. If you’re a linux shell fan and are using Msys2 or Cygwin on windows, then an additional tweak is to enable the experimental Posix compatible PTY support in ConEmu. I’ve been a long term ConEmu user and did not know about this till yesterday.

Neovim on Windows 7

4 Jun, 2015 vim

Neovim on Windows For folks who dig vim as an editor, you have most likely heard of Neovim - a fork of the vim with the goal to modernize the codebase and add unit tests. In fact, on Linux, the editor’s been functional for quite some time and I’ve replaced vim with neovim - and I’ve hardly ever come across a serious issue. My original dotvim works flawlessly with all 54 plugins loaded and running!

JS development - 2015

1 Jun, 2015 Javascript

#_javascript_in_20151. Javascript in 2015 If you’re managing any sort web application development then you’re going to manage how your front end is built and how well it stands up to change over time. Even if FE is not of your area of expertise or you generally hate having to do anything with the front end (typical of most folks who spend their time lower in the stack), it doesn’t hurt to understand the space - especially if it’s (or may become) your job to manage the software development.

Password utopia - finally!

31 Jul, 2014 Tips Tools Utilities

Passwords - what a pain. Bajillions of websites, different usernames, work projects and their environments and their passwords…how the hell are you supposed to keep track of all of it. And then a dozen different machines that you work on… and need access to your passwords Each of us have their own mechanisms - plain text file 'hidden' some place to slightly more advanced ones. For the longest of times, I used to have a GPG encrypted text file sync’ed over my github repository.

Weekend with yeoman, grunt, bower and oh so much more

18 May, 2014 bower grunt Javascript

Weekend with Yeoman So it started with a post on reddit (something that I spend too much time on.) about an interactive Angular JS tutorial. It’s been some time since I played with Angular and decided to spend some time on it. One website led to another and I eventually got around to Yeoman. So ended up digging into Yeoman a lot more than anything else. Given our status at work building brewmaster and scheduler, and our architecture where the front end is just consuming REST services, we might be able to move to a pure Nodejs front end.

Nginx reverse proxy with SSL offloading and authentication

14 May, 2014 nginx linux

What’s it Recently we’ve started down the ElasticSearch/Kibana road and also had a handful of other node.js apps. Setting up access control for these was becoming a pain - especially with ES which doesn’t come with any authentication/security out of the box. General advice on the interwebs is to let upstream server handle authentication and SSL + basic auth is good enough. Install nginx sudo apt-get install nginx apache2-utils Apache2 utils is for generating the htpasswd file for use later.

Upgrading to Kitkat on Nexus4 from rooted, custom 4.3 ROM

15 Nov, 2013 Android

Kitkat’s here! So Google finally posted kitkat factory images for Nexus4. Saw it on Reddit this morning and started the download before I had my morning cuppa. Hmm - and then to flash. Flashing image will nuke your device (including all photos etc) which I didn’t want. As I was on AOKP, a data wipe will be needed but there’s no reason to kill my storage too. And while we’re at it, why not also root it in the process.