Friday, 17 May 2013
Way back in early 2009 my wrists started acting up. As a professional software developer only two years into my young career, this was super concerning. I asked around at the office and my coworkers told me I should get a Kinesis Advantage Pro keyboard, which aside from being super goofy looking, seems to have cured a lot of people of their RSI symptoms. I looked into it and eventually broke down and bought one, and then another one because the first developed some sticky keys but I didn't want to part with it to send it back for service.
Using a mouse with the Kinesis is a little bit tiring, though. It's a much larger keyboard than you might be used to, so the reach from keyboard to mouse is in kind of a weird direction and your mouse might be in a weird spot. I've been using an Apple Magic Trackpad for the past few years and after awhile I got sick of the reach and stuck it in the obvious place, the giant blank spot between the keywells of the Kinesis, like so:
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Friday, 10 May 2013
For as long as I can remember I've been trying to find a good way to keep personal text notes. Recipes, notes, ideas, that kind of thing. Things that aren't really suited to blogging. Along the way I've used (and stuck with) PmWiki, DocuWiki, TiddlyWiki, and most recently I built my own sort-of-pseudo-wiki Marginalia.
Lately, though, it's been kind of a drag to use a web-based application just to write down some work notes. Having sort of an obsession with Markdown I decided to just start keeping notes in Markdown-formatted files in a directory. Of course, files that aren't backed up are likely to disappear at any moment, so I naturally stuck them in a git repository and pushed to my personal git server. But then, how do I deal with synching my work and home machines? I guess I'll manually merge changes...
Tagged:
Programming
Git
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Sunday, 27 January 2013
Inspired by Tim Bray's recent post about encrypting his website, I decided to enable and force HTTPS for bugsplat.info. The process was straightforward and, turns out, completely free. Read on to find out how and why.
Tagged:
Programming
Meta
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Wednesday, 9 January 2013
Yesterday I suddenly developed the intense need to add search to this site. Among the problems with this is that the site is kind of a weird hybrid between static and dynamic, and it has no database backend. If posts were stored in Postgres this would be a trivial matter, but they're just markdown files on disk. After flailing around for awhile I came across a library named Whistlepig which purported to do in-memory full text indexing with a full query language.
Tagged:
Programming
Meta
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Monday, 31 December 2012
For the longest time I used zoneedit as my DNS provider of choice. All of my important domains were hosted there, they never really did me wrong. A few months back I decided that I wanted to learn how DNS actually works in the real world, though. Like, what does it actually take to run my own DNS servers?
Tagged:
DNS
Devops
Email
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