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Need a quiet, dark place?

By Andrew, 29 September, 2019

Need to find a place to see the Northern Lights? Need to a little more quiet in your life? Or Just need to get away from it all for a little while?

The National Transportation Noise Map and the Dark Site Finder have you covered. 

When you find your dark, quiet space, please do remember to mute and dim any electronic device that you're carrying.

Keyboard shortcuts

By Andrew, 22 July, 2019

Can't remember the keyboard shortcuts for an application? Want to discover shortcuts that you've never knew existed? Check out? defkey

Command of the month: df

By Andrew, 10 May, 2019

How much disk space do you have left? Says you to a computer. Well just say "df."  Or perhaps just say "df -h" if you are made out of carbon.

Give me a P... WEBP

By Andrew, 10 May, 2019

With the release of Firefox 65 earlier this year, every modern (as in "Non-Internet Explorer") browser now supports WEBP, so I'm thinking that it might be time to start incorporating this image format into production work.  I remember following  the development of the JPEG 2000  format with anticipation, followed by forgetfulness.  But now it appears as if we do indeed have a new and shiny format to play with.

Among some of the new format's perks are its improved compression over JPEG and PNG. Or that's at least what Google says:

WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images at equivalent SSIM quality index. 

WEBP can even do animations. Perhaps we can soon end the arguments on how to properly pronounce "GIF"?  

Can I use ___ accessibility feature?

By Andrew, 18 April, 2019

While I'm a big fan of the numerous references that allow you to see which parts of HTML5, CSS, JS that you can use, I also frequently use similar resources that describe various technologies' support of accessibility-related standards:

  • WAI-ARIA - Screen reader compatibility · PowerMapper Software
  • Browser & Assistive Technology Tests Redux | TPG – Digital Accessibility Solutions

 

Linux turns 5

By Andrew, 4 March, 2019

Earlier this year I noticed that Bash released version 5 . Now Linux turns 5 as well. While Linus did say  "that '5.0' doesn't mean anything more than that the 4.x numbers started getting big enough that I ran out of fingers and toes," it's still a round number and makes me think back about the various version numbers of the kernel that I've used over the years. 

It also makes me think about version number inflation. My relationships with Bash and Linux are approaching drinking age in length.   Chrome, having only been around a decade is already at version 72. 

Command of the month: Do you du?

By Andrew, 3 March, 2019

While I do like and use the GUI DiskUsageAnalyzer and the ncurses-based Ncdu to examine disk usage on Linux systems, there is something that feels good about getting back to basics and using command line tools like the du (disk usage) command once and a while. While there is no doubt that using the command line does require a little more effort and might even  necessitate an occasional trip to a man page, the simplicity and power of commands like the following appeal my inner minimalist:

du -h --max-depth=2 | sort -hr

This command (which lists and sorts disk usage of directories two levels down from the point of execution) not only returns information faster than any GUI tool can, but it is much easier to use in automated scripts or via cron to auto-generate reports and the like.

Get better Git

By Andrew, 29 January, 2019

Does  Git's terrible, difficult, sucky CLI makes many people hate on it.  If you resemble this remark, you might want to check out some fixes to the git interface that make it more usable.

Bash turns 5

By Andrew, 27 January, 2019

Earlier this month, Bash released version 5 of the now near-ubiquitous shell. As always, you can RTFM to learn more.

Google trusts you too much

By Andrew, 20 October, 2018

Google announced 5 major security updates for Chrome extensions.  One of the updates mentioned that "the company will also start closely monitoring extensions with a remotely hosted code to spot malicious changes quickly."  You mean extensions are currently allowed to insert remotely hosted code?  And remotely hosted code that apparently isn't monitored too closely? Man, that is kind of frightening.   

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