Work

While building my work product on the fancy-schmancy M1 work Mac, I kept running into clang errors, when I did a pip install Turns out, PyCLD3 would not build. So I did it manually. This tip on Github did the trick We need brew installed. And then we run the following commands in a terminal … brew install protobuf #install protobuf # set various compiler flags export GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_OPENSSL=1 export GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_ZLIB=1 export CFLAGS='-I /opt/homebrew/opt/protobuf/include' export LDFLAGS=-L/opt/homebrew/opt/protobuf/lib # install pycld3 python3 -m pip install pycld3 And we’re set! ...

Update: 28/12/2021 The solution? Move off the 64 bit Raspberry Pi OS and install Ubuntu. Everything below is now just for history and context :) Every time I update my Pi, whether it be an kernel update or due to something goofy I do, it refuses to be accessible via ssh after it boots back up. And everytime I bring it back to my desk, it just works. And when I put it back into its niche, by the door, it continues to work. But inevitably, sooner or later, comes a reboot, and we’re back to being inaccessible. No ssh, no plex, no network. ...

Stuff for future Jason to take note, when he tries to redo his Huginn instance … I wanted a quick and easy way to install it, without messing up my base system much, so I chose the Docker route. Now, I don’t know the A or D of Docker, so these quick notes for me to remember in the future. I need to install Docker rootless, and bring it up as a systemd service. If I want persistent data, I should create a Docker volume. Create an env file to hold all the secrets that I want to pass to the container I need to run and create my huggins instance first, give it a name, pass the env file and also remembering to mount the volume at the place I need I can then start and stop the image with the name I assigned it. I need to then tag the image with a policy to restart automatically So everytime Docker comes up, it will start the container automatically. P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list! Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe! P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit. ...

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 20th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) Ok, I’m a day late, but hopefully not a dollar short1 :) This work letter is going out to all of you my friends, because there’s not much technical stuff in here. And because I have a spot of good news to share. I got a jobby job! I’ve been trying the past few years, to switch my career to something that wasn’t as taxing, as consulting on hardware and networks and integrating systems. While I loved the work, it was a lot of work, for not enough money and it took a toll on my physical health.2 So writing software from the comfort of my home, is it. And two weeks in, the team’s taken me under their wing and they are guiding me along and I’m loving it! ...

So I do this peculiar thing, where I prepend the author’s initials to the title of every book I add to Calibre.1 2 And all these years, I’ve just been manually editing the metadata, everytime I added a book, and changing the titles to what I want. It’s not a problem if it’s just one book, but I normally tend to go hogwild with authors, normally buying out / downloading all their work. And now that I’ve learnt the basics of the hammer called regex, I wanted to see, you guessed it, if there was a way to quickly do this using regular expressions in Caliber, which has inbuilt support for regexes. ...

Will update this page whenever I come across something regex, that I love. Damian Conway’s 5 hour, Understanding Regular Expressions series. This one is the bestestest regex resource ever. If you know the basics of programming and then want to pick up Regular Expressions, this is it.1 And Damian is one of the finest, bestestestest teachers around. Damian Conway’s hour long youtube talk and the accompanying slides RegexTip, one of John D Cook’s many twitter accounts. This one specialises in, you guessed it, regex tips Regex cheatsheets? This one, by Damian Conway and this one by Dave Child. Want to keep regex top of mind? Use Anki? This is the deck I love Unnecessary, ars gratia artis like Deep Dive? The Friedl book is it. Also don’t be like me and try to learn Regex first. You’re just making it harder on yourself. It is indeed possible, but nearly every regex resource presumes basic programming knowledge. It does not have to be much. Loops and variables and such, Automate the Boring Stuff is good for that, but I don’t want to digress into Python resources 😂 ↩︎ ...