BlogDB

UNLINK vs DEL - A deep dive into how it works internally in Redis 🪢

Using ExifTool to Set Dates Based on Filename

ExifTool has been a surprisingly useful piece of software in my recent quest to archive all of my family photographs. This includes scanned film from before the time of personal computers and also ...

Retired Man Tries to Spend More Money, Mostly Fails

A couple of years ago, Mr. Money Mustache lost some credibility among the faithful when he wrote this blog post about actually trying to spend a bit more money, while buying a Tesla as the first st...

Adding a Copy Button to Code Blocks

Copying code from code blocks, without having to manually select it all first, is very handy convenience feature. But despite having published a ton of code snippets on this website, adding copy fu...

Bye WordPress, Hello Hugo

I’ve been writing blogs since March of 1999. Yes, I’m old. When I started, my friend Ben suggested Moveable Type, and it worked well until around 2003 when they decided to switch their license from...

Critical Rsync Vulnerability Requires Immediate Patching on Linux and Unix systems

Rsync is a opensource command-line tool in Linux, macOS, *BSD and Unix-like systems that synchronizes files and directories. It is a popular tool for sending or receiving files, making backups, or ...

It takes a village

I typically describe my career as being the result of a lot of luck. There are so many key moments in my professional journey that just happened to go right for me while also being largely out of m...

Working differently in 2025

I have made a few resolutions going into the new year. Two of them have to do with All About Berlin. The first resolution is to work less. I am not a workaholic by any stretch of the imagination, b...

Odd Mart Oddities: JP Coovert’s Nintendo-style TTRPG Zines!

Its a rare Saturday. The snowy midwinter of Minneapolis, Minnesota peeks its head into the door despite the growing global sauna. Time and space are an open runway for one geeky writer of one disco...

ZFS Raidz Expansion Finally, Here in version 2.3.0

After years of development and testing, the ZFS raidz expansion is finally here and has been released as part of version 2.3.0. ZFS is a popular file system for Linux and FreeBSD. RAIDz is like RAI...

I #100DaysToOffload’d

Heyo, I did it! Nice. Did what exactly, you ask? Dear reader, I wrote & published 100 posts to my personal blog over a 1-year period. That’s what #100DaysToOffload is all about. It was almost a yea...

The Missing Mentoring Pillar

The Missing Mentoring Pillar The programming languages (PL) community has developed a whole host of mentoring pillars to help new research become a part of our community The Programming Languages M...

!mdnio

tl;dr Use the !mdnio bang on DuckDuckGo or Kagi as a shortcut when searching MDN. I’ve been a DuckDuckGo user for a while — one of the killer features that initially drew me in were the bangs. Put ...

My Predictions for Tech in 2025: Chaos Reigns

If you are looking to have your spirit lifted, you came to the wrong place because, as I see it, the trend lines almost all point in one depressing direction.

What's involved in getting a "modern" terminal setup?

Hello! Recently I ran a terminal survey and I asked people what frustrated them. One person commented: There are so many pieces to having a modern terminal experience. I wish it all came out of the...

JWCC: JSON With Comments & (Trailing) Commas

Re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42360681 The HN thread above from a ~month ago is on JSON5, which extends the JSON spec. It’s a rather weird name: it’s not the fifth version of JSON, but a...

📚 The Anthropocene Reviewed

This would have been a great opportunity to use “The Anthropocene Reviewed, reviewed” if not for the sake of my conforming to consistent title format for book review posts. Alas, the pun is already...

Autonomous Vehicles in Norway - Winter Edition

Ruter is according to Wikipedia “a public transport authority for Oslo and Akershus counties in Norway”.[1] Ruter suggests that on-demand transportation could be a great alternative to private cars...

Why isn’t my translation showing up?

Here we go again for another post of this blog’s irregular column, entitled Django’s Friday Tips. Today let’s address a silent issue, that any of you that have formerly worked with internationaliza...

What if one of your online friends dies unexpectedly?

A lot of people experience online friends "vanishing" without notice. A new nonprofit project tries to help prevent this issue and it's worth joining and supporting the project!