Habits are really important. Long-term goals are too but, ultimately, habits are what you are doing to yourself day in, day out. Your habits determine what goes into your body (your diet), your physical condition (diet and exercise) and your mental condition (sleep and everything else). I think you should make...

I ran into a weird problem where I couldn’t access the OPNsense web UI using an OPT1 interface. The fix is easy, but it can be very confusing and it’s all caused by an unintuitive default. tl;dr If you can’t access the web UI via an OPT1 interface, try disabling the “reply-to” feature:...

The title of this post isn’t supposed to be provocative. After all, it’s simply the textbook definition of what git is. So why bother stating it? Well, I’ve worked with a fair few junior developers now and I’m starting to see a pattern. Many of these developers have never programmed without git and they see git...

The Norfolk Coast Path (NCP) is a waymarked, long-distance footpath and National Trail in England. It stretches from Hunstanton all the way along the Norfolk coastline to Hopton. I walked it with my partner Vicki over the course of seven days in September 2022. Planning The NCP is around 135 km (83 miles) long and...

At first glance, undo seems like a simple thing expected of most software these days and hardly worth writing about. Indeed, when I say Emacs has a very powerful undo system—probably more so than any other text editor—you may wonder what could make an undo system powerful. So let’s start by considering two big...

When you work a lot on the command line, history can be invaluable. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve forgotten how I ran some earlier command and used my bash history to find out what it was. This is one of the big advantages of using CLIs over GUIs. Accessing history The main interface I use to my...

For as long as I’ve been a Firefox user—almost 20 years at this point—it has featured a “quick find” bound to the venerable / (forward slash) key. Following a pattern established by other software like less, man, and vi the slash key was simple: it finds stuff in the current page. Common patterns like this are...

Org mode supports icons in its agenda views. The icons can be given as either file paths to images (like SVGs), as image data or as a display property. I use a Nerd Font along with the nerd-icons package in my Emacs config, so I thought I might as well enable icons in my org agenda views. The nice thing about using...

This blog is a static site built with Hugo. Being static means it can be served from a basic, standard (you might say stupid) web server with no server-side scripting at all. In fact, this blog is currently hosted on Github Pages, but it could be anywhere. Up until now, if you wanted to include an interactive map on...

Docker Compose is a brilliant tool for bringing up local development environments for web projects. But working with multiple projects can be a pain due to clashes. For example, all projects want to listen to port 80 (or perhaps one of the super common higher ones like 8000 etc.). This forces developers to only...

I use the Unbound DNS resolver built in to pfSense. By default the resolver filters out any results that are private IP addresses. Normally this makes sense: no public domain should have a private address. But sometimes it does make sense. For example there are some useful services like sslip.io that will resolve to...

Even after using Emacs for 15 years there’s still so much I can learn. I probably should have already known this, but there’s a first time for everything. It’s rare that Emacs hangs. Exceedingly rare. Which is probably why I didn’t know how to deal with it. Today Emacs started hanging when trying to open files over...