Linux

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 😂 ↩︎ ...

Am using my rickety old laptop as my daily driver these days, because … reasons. And now, that I run PyCharm alongside Emacs, alongside Chrome in its various incarnations, the poor old thing crashes, freezes and stutters a lot. A cursory inspection told me that while I had plenty of CPU firepower, I was constantly running out of ram (8gb) and swap (1 gb partition). Too broke to add more ram to the system right now (don’t even know if this thing will support 8 gb modules to push it up to 16). So the only way to go, was to somehow increase the swap on my system. This is the checklist for curious / researching Jason in the future. ...

Did I not just write about this, the other day with Emacs? I did, but Pycharm seems to have the same affliction. Pycharm, just like Emacs, stubbornly refuses to accept my Compose key combinations. Which means … you guessed it, no ‘,”,“ or ’ punctuation and all the other affordances, Compose gives me. Considering that I need both, Pycharm as well as Emacs in my life, it behooved me, that I go solve this too. ...

I want to leave VS Code behind me and move to using Emacs for mostly everything I write in the long haul. Emacs is the editor I use to putter around for any text editing I need to do, but most of my long form writing and coding were done in VS Code. And the more I use it (VS Code, not Emacs), the more uncomfortable I get, no matter how nice and shiny it is. ...

Sometimes, I want to share snippets of what I am reading with my friends. Kindles make it easy, with screenshots. The only issue being I want to share the full length of two pages, like I’d do if I was reading a book. And I need it often enough, that I felt I needed to go figure out some way to do it. It was an easy-ish hack on the mac with printing with Preview. But now, that I use Linux, I wondered if I could do better. ...

Listening to me bitch and moan about the new direction CentOS, CentOS Stream, is now going in, someone sent me this post to tell me why this was a good thing. It’s a lovely post and I agree with most everything the author says. But I do believe, he talks past the main reason folks like me use CentOS. (and the main reason, Rocky Linux now exists.) CentOS came into existence because sci/tech folk wanted a base to build on and became popular, because old harried sysadmins like me wanted to support small shops, who did not have the budget to run servers and wanted to get out of the ever tightening thumb of Microsoft. ...