Keybits
Keybits
Tom Atkins
’ website. You might also like my
shared links
,
photos
and
short posts on Bluesky
. Email
[email protected]
I love the garden at this time of year
Jun 16, 2024
— The winters in Ireland are long, dark and wet. But it’s worth it for early summer. I love this time of year when everything bursts into life. Here’s a photo of our garden today.
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Saving and sharing links
Feb 27, 2024
— I like to save interesting links in a ‘bookmark manager’. The main benefit is that I can close tabs and stop wondering if I should read something now or how I’ll find it later. Since 2009 (15 years!) I’ve had a Pinboard account. I’ve saved over 10,000 bookmarks there. I regularly use it to find things I’ve read or seen and build knowledge on topics I’m interested in. Nearly all my bookmarks have tags to help search topics. Something I hope to do soon is to go through some of my more popular tags, such as ‘w…
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Proudly presenting PostOwl!
Sep 11, 2023
— It's been a long time ambition to create a useful open-source web application. A bit like music, there's a vast amount of software being created, so why make more? Mainly to 'scratch my own itch'. PostOwl is something I want to use. It's also, hopefully, something I'll be able to recommend to people when they say 'I want a personal website that's simple to update'. In the past I've tried creating web apps on my own. My programming skills are quite basic, so the results weren't very inspiring. For PostOwl I …
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PikaPods - excellent open-source app hosting
Dec 21, 2022
— If you're looking for a cost effective way to host open source apps for personal use but don't want to self-host, I can highly recommend https://www.pikapods.com/ You'll probably discover some useful apps you haven't heard of too: https://www.pikapods.com/apps
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Watch for new tags on GitHub repos
Nov 27, 2022
— GitHub has an Atom feed for tags so you can subscribe to them with your RSS reader. The format is: This is useful for projects that don't use Releases. For example Elixir packages tend to use tags and then release on Hex (which as far as I can tell doesn't have any way to be notified of new releases). If the project you're following uses Releases then you can use GitHub's built in 'Watch' feature: If you like Atom / RSS feeds there are more available on GitHub:
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ooh.directory
Nov 4, 2022
— Great to see this new site from Phil Gyford: How the web should be! Human curated lists of interesting independent things. With RSS. Here's the launch post from his (excellent) blog.
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asdf and direnv - isolated environment heaven
Oct 26, 2022
— Well, maybe not quite heaven, but the combination of asdf and direnv is the best solution I've found to the problem of: Managing multiple versions of languages installed at the same time Creating isolated environments for application development with a specific language version Of course lots of people prefer Docker or Nix to achieve this. For me, on an Apple Silicon macBook, with the languages and tools I use, I've found asdf and direnv to be effective without too much complexity. (This guide assumes you'r…
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A more secure VPS with SSH via Tailscale
Sep 5, 2021
— TLDR: Read these docs on the Tailscale site. If, like me, you have a VPS that serves some low traffic websites, you probably have SSH configured so you can perform admin tasks. Hopefully you disable password authentication and use public key authentication instead. That makes things more secure, but It's still annoying to see all the attempted connections in auth.log and I'm always looking to make things as secure as possible. What if we could disable SSH access from the public Internet altogether? I've bee…
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My favourite podcast - BBC Science in Action
Apr 11, 2021
— If you enjoy keeping up-to-date with current science news, I can recommentd Science in Action from the BBC World Service. It goes out weekly on a Thursday and you can subscribe to the podcast to listen when it suits you. A big part of why I enjoy it so much is the presenter, Roland Pease. He consistently explains things in a way that's easy to understand, while still being accurate. The interviewees are experts in their fields and almost always respond with 'exactly!' after Roland has summarised an aspect o…
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Keeping old posts online
Mar 20, 2021
— This site has been given a fresh start. All the old posts have been moved to old.keybits.net. Thanks to Conor for the motivation for keeping outdated stuff online. That version of the site was limited to technical posts. There weren't very many of them recently! Between 2005 and 2015 I had a site where I shared photos and links to music I was enjoying. It initially lived at minktoast.net and then moved to life.keybits.net. It was a WordPress site. Before I took it offline I exported a static copy, complete …
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Hey (this is my) world
Mar 13, 2021
— Jason Fried and DHH recently launched a new feature for their email service called 'Hey World'. Send an email to a special address and it gets posted on a nice web page. It's great to see another option for easily publishing to the web. Especially one where the pages are fast to load and easy to read. From Jason's introductory post: I've never had a personal blog.It wasn't for lack of things to say, observations to share, or opinions to float. Unlike Jason I've had a personal site for many years. More speci…
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Buy yourself time if a server's disk fills up
Mar 26, 2020
— This post was doing the rounds today, so I just did fallocate -l 1G reserve.img to create a 1GB file on all my (small personal) servers in case the disk on them ever fills up and I need to buy some time to sort it out.
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Great tips in the Shell Field Guide
Feb 21, 2020
— The Shell Field Guide is treasure trove of handy Shell tips including scripting for Bash / Zsh. The section on Faster Iteration with Pipes being a highlight.
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