dammIT

A rantbox

#tech Articles


Unzip a bunch of zips in a oneliner

Ever needed to unzip a bunch of zip files into their own directory and you don't want to do so one by one? No? Well, here I have a oneliner for you anyway: ls -1 *.zip | while read zf; do echo ${zf::-4}; unzip "$zf" -d "${zf::-4}"; done This …

dammIT alchemy

Today I've been busy with a family party and with a total restyle of this weblog based on Pelican Alchemy Bootstrap 4 and the Bootswatch Lux theme, with my own twist in dark-ish grey. Currently it is generating from my own fork with isso comment support and article images. Breakage …

Help hunt bugs, do not just report them

Today I came across the forum post Don’t report bugs, contribute to bugs hunting about more directly helping (open source) developers help you. Developers really try to write working solutions and like Aurélien Pierre notes: We are the developers. That means we can guarantee you that the software works …

darktable and opencl in Ubuntu 19.04

Editing and even viewing (raw) photographs can be a bit taxing on your CPU. If you have an Nvidia GPU, you can supercharge your photo editor by using its OpenCL extensions to offload operations to. Using darktable myself, I had to do a minor bit of research before it worked …

Receive Sentry messages as Telegram notifications

To be able to receive Sentry notifications on Telegram (without using the plugin which only works in the self-hosted Sentry server), one can use webhooks. As I have webhaak to ducttape together webhook all the things, I created a script to send messages to our dev chat, filtering away some …

Online life enhancer, edition 1

Today I want to talk to you about the web and how it sometimes sucks. At least, the experience can suck a bit, especially when it is not open enough so you can set things to your own hands. Take for example YouTube, where overlays can ruin the end of …
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'Social gardens', or 'More reasons to dammIT'

Lately I've been making some changes in how I interact with social media, and also how I consume its news and blurps. I started using Mastodon and basically moved my interest there (I tend to double post to both Mastodon and Twitter, as Twitter is still where most of my …

I remember writing

I remember writing (yes, writing) short weblog updates in the train on my Sony Clie running PalmOS, using the fast glyphs of Graffiti, in 2004. I want to go back to that, realising that my weblog had turned into a collection of longer articles as of late, spaced quite far …


diskspacealarm.py

Because it's Friday, I was bitten by a filled-up volume on my VPS again, because Prometheus somehow is randomly crashing my VPS, and because I like thinkering and Python, I wrote a little notification script. Yes, it checks for available disk space on your nodes, with configuration per hostname (it's …

Using older devices

As an enthusiast for technological things in general, and gadgets in particular, I like to use (and own) shiny devices. Be it a fast (and slightly big) smartphone with the latest OS, or a laptop with a lot of muscle and a 4K (touch)screen, I really can find a …
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When your Pebble doesn't want to talk web anymore

A few weeks ago I started noticing an odd problem: my Pebble Time Steel didn't want to update its various apps anymore. The watchface showed stale weather data, the public transports apps didn't want to tap into the latest departure times and so on. This of course annoyed me a …

ssh config.d to tidy up that archeology-worthy ~/.ssh/config

You might be in that same situation as I was until recently: you open up your ssh config file and start scrolling through the long list of nicely aliased private machines, that organically grown list of work - project A and the comment-section-divided work - project B, work - misc, work - are these …

How to smooth up your Firefox on Linux, including video

After having one of our Hangouts videocalls, I started looking into why the browser plugin takes so much CPU-time (and makes the laptop hot and breezy in the process). Is stumbled upon the article How to tell if you're using hardware acceleration and dove into my own about:support page …

A solution to some odd Gnome 3.16 issues

I'm running Ubuntu Gnome 15.04 with the ppa's to bring me Gnome 3.16 (gnome3-team and gnome3-staging). After a bit of fiddling (removing some old extensions and packages), I got it to show me GDM. After getting into the desktop, there were some odd issues though. These issues also …

Meeting budgets: an idea to keep meetings useful

You need meetings. No really, you do. Your team has to line up, get and stay on target and decisions have to be made. The same goes with your stakeholders. However, everyone knows about those meetings that seem to go on forever, have too many participants and/or seem to …

Acer C720p Chromebook: my new hacktop

After Chromebook: for fun and profit? @ 2014-10-05 I got myself an Acer C720p for cheap. It's new, just cheap, as that's how Chromebooks go :) It has a new-fangled touchscreen, which I actually tend to use while on Chrome OS. I hadn't thought I would do so (hey, it's a laptop …



update_repos: keep up-to-date with your projects

While I was standardising my dotfiles I wanted to have an easy and quick way to update my projects so repositories weren't out of date when I wanted to use them (for example when being offline on the train), and I didn't want to go through them by hand every …