I have written before about using Alacritty as my terminal and I’ve configured it using YAML. I’ve been a general fan of YAML, I like the way the syntax looks and there aren’t too many brackets of any kind, if it had a line terminator, that’d be great. The downside is that it is indent dependent. But for the most part I’m comfortable with YAML and wherever an option is provided for using YAML, I pick it over TOML....
This blog post can also be found at 1ba87346. This short URL is designed to make sharing online more compact without having to use an external URL shortening service. The permalink for this post is 62 characters (plus base URL, everything following discounts the base URL), while the short URL is 11 characters. Every post will predictably be 11 characters since I’m using CRC32 hash of the permalink to generate the short link....
A great thing about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is that anyone can create a thing, share it with others, and anyone else can contribute and make it better. It’s also great to solve a problem for yourself and just share it with the world just in case it helps someone else. I know I have benefited from both those modalities, so I have tried to share a few tools and knowledge on this blog and through my repos....
I have access to webhosting through the generosity of a friend and his hosting provider used CPanel and offers paid SSL certificates but does allow for SSH access. So, the best and free way to get SSL certificates is getting certificates from Let’s Encrypt using acme.sh. While I’ve had this setup for years and it works great, it’s a real issue if it breaks because I do the sad thing of hitting up in the terminal history #somuchshame....
I built a small table this weekend and realized that the thing I desperately need if I’m going to build more stuff is a workbench. There are a TON of workbench options to pick from, which is great. But, I didn’t want to get into picking and choosing dimensions and features on the fly, that was asking for a disaster. So I decided to take the plunge and learn FreeCAD. There are excellent YouTube videos targeted at “FreeCAD for Woodworkers” which was a delightful surprise....
I’ve been using org-transclusion for an “inverse literate” Emacs config and tangling all the config chunks on save and exporting it as a markdown file. This has worked fairly well except for the fact that org-export creates org-export regenerates ids for all the headings which creates noise in the git commit history and also in-page anchors can’t be reliably linked to a specific part of the document (independent of the git forge’s markdown parsing implementation)....
Gnome Terminal and fish I have been using the default Gnome Terminal with the fish shell for a long time and it has served me well. Since fish provides a lot of functionality out of the box (including meta information about git repos in the prompt), I have stuck with it for the convenience. However, there is ONE major downside to fish; it is not POSIX compliant. Why ditch fish? See what had happened was… Non-POSIX compliant wasn’t a big problem until I found myself writing a couple helper functions with fish syntax....
I use a Corne low profile keyboard running the QMK firmware. It is a 42 key layout and although it has a sixth column where a lot of folks put the traditional SHIFT and CTRL modifier keys, I’ve opted to go with the home row mods so that I’m not stretching my fingers and negating some of the ergonomic advantages. The downside is that it is difficult to type full words/phrases in capital letters without switching which hand is holding the modifier....
I have been wanting to transition my photography site to Hugo as well but have not investigated how to utilize Hugo’s image processing capabilities. Yesterday I came across Wivik’s helpful shortcodes that display EXIF information and presents the photo with a frame and a caption. I’m experimenting with it now and might modify it and eventually migrate my photography content. I ran into nil pointer evaluating resource.Resource.Resize error when running the shortcode and tried out the built-in figure shortcode with the same path to verify that it wasn’t an actual path issue....
I fell down the split ergo mechanical keyboard rabbit hole thanks to a dear friend who was kind enough to loan me his Gergoplex (despite my incessant teasing about his hipster keyboard). The Gergoplex is on the deeper end of the rabbit-hole with only 36 keys and 12g switches but it demonstrated the value to me. I ended up getting a pre-built Corne and added the lightest switches I could find at the time: Gateron MX 35g switches....