Create custom macOS menu bar apps using Hammerspoon April 26, 2023, 9:47 a.m.

Hammerspoon of course provides a setIcon method on menubar to help us provide an image icon, so we’ll just grab a Slack icon from the web and—whoa, what’s this???

imageData … can be one of the following …
– A string beginning with ASCII: which signifies that the rest of the string is interpreted as a special form of ASCII diagram, which will be rendered to an image and used as the icon.

Ok, drop everything, we’re doing this. Check out this craziness: With simple ASCII character progression, we can define vector art!

tutorial hammerspoon

systemd by example - the systemd playground Jan. 27, 2022, 11:32 a.m.

The playground allows you to learn about systemd interactively, right from your browser! Create examples without the danger of breaking your system, and without being distracted by hundreds of unrelated unit files.

tutorial linux

How To Use Rsync to Sync Local and Remote Directories Feb. 11, 2021, 10:26 p.m.

Rsync, which stands for “remote sync”, is a remote and local file synchronization tool. It uses an algorithm that minimizes the amount of data copied by only moving the portions of files that have changed.

tutorial linux rsync

Getting Started with macOS Programming in Swift June 23, 2020, 1:57 p.m.

In this post we are going to see the basics of a macOS app through the creation of a simple, but at the same time useful for many developers app: A font viewer that will let us choose font families and it will be displaying the PostScript names of the available fonts.

tutorial mac programming swift

Running GUI’s with Docker on Mac OS X Dec. 23, 2019, 8:15 p.m.

We are very familiar with running CLI processes in Docker containers with no Graphical UI at all. But did you know that you can just as well run applications with a graphical user interfaces, like Chrome, Firefox, Tor Browser, Gimp, etc… with Docker… on OS X!

tutorial docker

Ansible module development: getting started Sept. 23, 2019, 12:18 p.m.

A module is a reusable, standalone script that Ansible runs on your behalf, either locally or remotely. Modules interact with your local machine, an API, or a remote system to perform specific tasks like changing a database password or spinning up a cloud instance. Each module can be used by the Ansible API, or by the ansible or ansible-playbook programs. A module provides a defined interface, accepting arguments and returning information to Ansible by printing a JSON string to stdout before exiting. Ansible ships with thousands of modules, and you can easily write your own. If you’re writing a module for local use, you can choose any programming language and follow your own rules. This tutorial illustrates how to get started developing an Ansible module in Python.

tutorial ansible python

Extending Ansible – modules Sept. 19, 2019, 1:51 p.m.

One of possible use cases for custom modules is a wrapper for shell command. If there is a task you do with cli command on different remote hosts and in differen parts of your playbook/project, you may want to wrap it into idempotent module with check-mode support to make your playbooks’ code clean and easy to read.

tutorial ansible

Self updating OSMC Distribution Sept. 10, 2019, 11:22 a.m.

Here is a small tutorial on how to get OSMC / linux self-updating.

tutorial linux documentation

How to add DNS filtering to your NAT instance with Squid Sept. 5, 2019, 11:36 a.m.

In this post, I discuss and give an example of how to use Squid, a leading open-source proxy, to implement a “transparent proxy” that can restrict both HTTP and HTTPS outbound traffic to a given set of Internet domains, while being fully transparent for instances in the private subnet.

tutorial aws networking squid

Tmux in practice: local and nested remote tmux sessions April 1, 2019, 8:37 a.m.

Some people prefer using tmux on the local machine only on top of their terminal emulator, supercharging it with multiplexing and window management in the first place. People who spent most of their time SSH’ing on remote hosts, make use of persistent session nature and resistance to network disconnects.

tutorial tmux terminal

How to perform a packet capture in Windows using netsh Oct. 25, 2018, 3:53 p.m.

Start the capture with netsh trace start capture=yes tracefile=foo.etl Stop the capture with netsh trace stop. Two files are created: foo.cab and foo.etl. These files can be opened with Microsoft Message Analyzer. Once the file has been loaded into Message Analyzer you can export it to pcap to view in Wireshark.

tutorial windows networking

A Tutorial Introduction to Kubernetes July 6, 2018, 8:57 a.m.

Kubernetes is the hottest kid on the block among container orchestration tools right now. In this tutorial, I want to document my journey of learning Kubernetes, clear up some points that tripped me as a beginner, and try to explain the most important concepts behind how it works.

tutorial devops reading sysadmin kubernetes

Smarter CSS builds with Webpack Jan. 17, 2018, 9:13 a.m.

Webpack, the amazing module bundling Swiss army knife that you should probably start using, is all about letting you write modular UI code with explicitly declared dependencies.

tutorial javascript css

Ten Things I Wish I’d Known About bash Jan. 9, 2018, 12:17 p.m.

You don’t have to look hard on the internet to find plenty of useful one-liners in bash, or scripts. And there are guides to bash that seem somewhat intimidating through either their thoroughness or their focus on esoteric detail.

Here I’ve focussed on the things that either confused me or increased my power and productivity in bash significantly, and tried to communicate them in a way that emphasises getting the understanding right.

tutorial bash

Sharing Your Labor of Love: PyPI Quick and Dirty Dec. 22, 2017, 8:33 a.m.

A completely incomplete guide to packaging a Python module and sharing it with the world on PyPI.

tutorial python

Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides for Windows Server 2008 May 29, 2017, 10:18 a.m.

The Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide Series provides concise planning guidance for Microsoft infrastructure products, helping to streamline and clarify design processes for unique infrastructure technologies and scenarios.

tutorial windows sysadmin windows server 2008

Creating an initial RRD May 26, 2017, 8:24 a.m.

When creating an RRD database we'll need to specify a couple things, namely one or more Data Sources and one or more Round Robin Archives. The data source (DS) defines what type of data is accepted and some boundaries on what constitutes good data. The round robin archives (RRA) can almost be thought of as views, it defines the different ways we can store and retrieve data.

tutorial programming rrdtool

RRDTool Tutorial May 22, 2017, 8:24 a.m.

RRDtool refers to Round Robin Database tool. Round robin is a technique that works with a fixed amount of data, and a pointer to the current element. Think of a circle with some dots plotted on the edge. These dots are the places where data can be stored. Draw an arrow from the center of the circle to one of the dots; this is the pointer. When the current data is read or written, the pointer moves to the next element. As we are on a circle there is neither a beginning nor an end, you can go on and on and on. After a while, all the available places will be used and the process automatically reuses old locations.

tutorial sysadmin networking rrdtool

RRDtool tutorial, graphs and examples May 21, 2017, 5:25 p.m.

RRDtool is a graphing utility made by Tobi Oetiker that takes data sets you collect and graphs them. RRDtool (acronym for round-robin database tool) correlates time-series data like network bandwidth, temperatures, CPU load or any other data type. Data is stored in a round-robin database (circular buffer) which allows the system storage footprint to remain constant over time. The database will always have the same amount of data points throughout its lifetime. When new data comes in the oldest data set is removed.

tutorial sysadmin rrdtool