TypstThree years ago I wrote about a workflow to generate PDF files out of my Markdown content, both on this website and on De Programmatica Ipsum. That first setup involved Pandoc and TeX, and it was a solution that worked well, but was unfortunately slow as hell, particularly given the amount of articles I have in both sites. A faster solution was badly needed.
Keychron Q3 MaxThis year I decided to treat myself with a new keyboard, and I’ve chosen the Keychron Q3 Max; this post is a short summary of my impressions after a few weeks of use.
KrokiKroki is a wonderful tool I discovered during the time I worked as DevRel: it’s a small open source containerized application (compatible with OpenShift off-the-box) written in JavaScript, that encapsulates as many textual diagram formats as possible under a single unified API, offering a convenient way for users to generate diagrams, without needing to install separate libraries everywhere.
Uses and Abuses of JiraI’ve been using Atlassian Jira for more than 20 years already at this point, and I have seen a fair share of patterns and antipatterns (that’s Japanese for “fuckups”) and, being the new rambling old man, I feel entitled to spread my dystopian views on the pages of this publication you’re reading right now.
Vibe Coding with CursorI work at a company that is truly invested into AI and LLMs, to the point that we can internally use (following some guidelines) quite a few tools in our day-to-day work: in particular, we have Gemini, Google NotebookLM, and Cursor available to all employees.
ZoteroWriting articles for De Programmatica Ipsum made me adopt a workflow to read and annotate research papers. Most of the material that I use to write articles for DPI are papers, nearly all in PDF format, some with OCR’d text, some without (particularly older ones).
CalibreI’ve already mentioned Calibre quite a few times in this blog in the past; for example when I talked about my sustainable ebook strategy, or when I gave some Flatpak tips and tricks. But Calibre has become such an important part of my workflow and daily computing habit, I feel I need to publish a product review about it.
Plugins for tmuxI’m a big fan of tmux since I started using it back in 2010. I can’t conceive working on a terminal window without it, and I also use it in remote systems I access via SSH.
My Faithful Logitech C930e WebcamI like boring technology that lasts decades: 2 years ago I was raving about my Harman Kardon SoundSticks (spoiler alert: they are still in service) and today I’d like to rave about my faithful Logitech C930e, an HDMI webcam that’s been with me for 10 years this month.
Screenkey for LinuxScreenkey is a program for Linux that can be used during presentations or webcasts to show the keystrokes you press to the audience, overlaid on top of the applications or systems being demoed. It could be considered the official replacement of the Mouseposé application for macOS.
HelixI’ve tried the Helix editor and, to be honest, I’m split. I have three specific things to say, though.
WordStar 7 for DOSI’m a Fedora Linux user, a very happy one at that, and there’s no shortage of decent text editors for Fedora; yet, I have to say that for the past few months I’ve been happily writing my text on the most awkward and backward editor you could think of… and it turned out to be one of the most pleasant writing experiences I’ve had in the past few years.
Share Your Terminal Live on the Web With ttydIf you’re in the business of giving demos or talking at conferences, webinars, or other gatherings, sooner or later you’ll have to show your terminal for a demo; in this case, this week’s article will surely interest you: ttyd.
Swiss SaaS You Probably Never Heard AboutI’ve recently talked about Proton and about how happy I am with their services, but it turns out that Switzerland has to offer much more in the realm of privacy-conscious SaaS.
LanguageToolAround two years ago I switched my writing AI helper of choice, going from Grammarly to LanguageTool, for many reasons.1
The Proton SuiteFirst, a mandatory disclaimer: this is not a sponsored post (there are none in this blog, btw), just me telling the story of how I became a happy Proton user during the past 5 years; I’m not affiliated with them in any way.
Adopting WezTermI’ve recently discovered WezTerm, also known as “Wez’s Terminal Emulator” by Wez Furlong, and I’ve adopted it completely, becoming my default terminal application.
Remembering SETI@HomeI recently saw a toot on Mastodon about the end of the SETI@Home program… and it brought back memories of the late 1990s.
ResticOne of the greatest discoveries I’ve made after switching to the Linux galaxy is, without any doubt, the fantastic Restic; a backup tool that deserves to be better known and more widely used.
Fedora 38In December 4th, 2005, I published my first blog post about Linux. I wrote it on Ubuntu 5.10 “Breezy” after installing it on my faithful iBook G3. Many years have passed, and I’ve become a full-time Linux user now, having used no other operating system in the past 5 years.
Macromedia FlashFor about 4 or 5 years, roughly from 1999 to 2004, Macromedia Flash was a big part of my career. I started making Flash movies for fun around 1998, but by 1999 I was already making them as part of my day-to-day job.
MatomoIn the past few weeks I’ve been making quite a few changes to this website. Some are visible, some less. Among the visible ones, I removed the downloadable PDF files feature, which were taking a lot of space and weren’t really that useful.
RedmineI was surprised to discover recently that good old Redmine not only still exists in 2023, but it thrives in various unexpected ways. Redmine is another one of those boring tech things that I love.
BootstrapI love Bootstrap. No matter which web frontend framework I try, I always end up returning to it.
EditPlusLast week I was celebrating the 20 years of my Harman Kardon SoundSticks, but last Monday there was another anniversary that some of us celebrated fondly: EditPlus 1.0, released March 20th, 1998, is 25 years old!
20 Years of Harman Kardon SoundSticksTwenty years ago, months before the scorching (and deadly) summer of 2003, I bought the transparent Harman Kardon SoundSticks that I still have above (and below) my desk today.
MastodonSeeing Twitter becoming the Muskverse was the last straw that took me to revive the Mastodon account I opened in 2017 and leave Twitter for good.
Cardfile.exeI started using Windows 11 recently. It’s changed a lot since the last time I used Windows professionally (those were the times of Windows XP, almost 20 years ago). Also, Chocolatey makes it really easy to install software on it.
GiteaGitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab; they are not the only solutions available to share Git repos with your friends and colleagues. I’ve been playing with Gitea recently, and it’s a really cool alternative, written in Go. Here’s a quick way to test it.
Text Editors for WorkThere has been a particular text editor that defined each period of my career as a software developer. This article is a summary of that history, so far.
Lots of VSCode ExtensionsThe recent release by Microsoft of vscode.dev, the online version of Visual Studio Code, made me think of all the different things I do with VSCode, including this blog. And of course, being productive in VSCode means, to a large extent, finding gems across a seemingly infinite number of extensions.
Vagrant, k3s and VirtualBoxLast weekend I decided to learn Vagrant to build a simple k3s Kubernetes cluster on top of a set of VirtualBox virtual machines.
Amazon EKS AnywhereI’ve been playing lately with Amazon EKS Anywhere, the Kubernetes distribution used by EKS that you can install in your own premises. It works pretty well and makes for a very decent alternative to Minikube, K3s and other similar “Kubernetes-in-your-laptop” packages.
JoplinNote taking is very important to me. I keep everything in my notes, from ideas for blog posts like this one, to code snippets, to web pages, to plans of never started businesses, and so much more.
Visual J++Once upon a time, there was a programming environment made by Microsoft called Visual J++. It was their attempt to do with Java what they had done with JScript before, and to be honest, it was quite cool. You could compile and run Java code on Windows with a very good IDE - this was 5 years before IntelliJ released IDEA! It generated much faster binaries than what the official Java compiler from Sun produced. Developers could access functionality inside of packages starting with the microsoft. name, but that of course that kind of broke the whole point of Java which is to make cross-platform stuff that you only write once and then you run everywhere.
WordPressI am a big WordPress fan. And I do not suffer from the NIH syndrome. So when I had to build a site for my company, the choice of WordPress was a natural one. I’ve been using it for Open Kosmaczewski (my personal blog now) for over 3 years, and I must say that it impresses every day a bit more.
ImageMagickImageMagick is a cool toolkit; not only it's a complete set of command-line applications, ported to Windows, Mac and Linux, supporting hundreds of different image formats, it's also a C++ library that you can use in your own applications!
iPhone SDK: Une Nouvelle Ere DémarreIl y a de moments clés dans l’histoire de la technologie. Hier soir, vers 18h (heure suisse), il s’est produit l’un de ces moments. Apple a dévoilé un SDK (Software Development Kit) pour l’iPhone, et le monde du développement logiciel mobile ne sera plus jamais le même. Voici pourquoi.
ErlangAs I said before, I like to learn a new programming language every year. I also like to read at least 6 computing-related books every year, but the article about those 6 will come later.
GitIf you haven’t tried git, you should. Git is a “distributed version control” system, that is, similar to Subversion with the big difference that… you do not need a server. There are only clients, any of them, and you can pull and push changes to and from other repositories from your project colleagues. The git Wikipedia entry does a much better job than me to introduce the subject :)
ExtShould you ever have to work on a web application again, just don’t think about it twice; Ext is an amazing piece of free software, light-years away from anything you’ve seen before.
XubuntuSince I discovered Ubuntu I’ve been trying to install it in different hardware, in different computers, even in virtual machines, and I just love it. It installs without problems, I can add and remove the coolest productivity and development tools fast and easy, everything is ready to use, and it just feels great.
RadrailsAfter having received a comment from Steven Ross I saw in his website a reference to RadRails.