I’ve ended up identifying basically 2 services that I need both for personal use as well as work to be efficient and safe. Cloud storage - ability to store files off my own computer and synchronize with all my computers Password manager - generating and storing good passwords and giving me convenient access to them when I need it It seems like these should be pretty widely wanted things, things that have been around for a long time, and there’s a lot of competition, yet I’ve been unable to find any good options.

PrefacePreviously I’ve written about how to develop “like a pro” on Windows with various tips and tricks about how to get your work optimized and solve common problems. Then I wrote Aperture Control to automate some of the common setup tasks for Windows. Standard development environment for WindowsNow, using Aperture Control and based on the tips, I’ve set up a repository to configure what I could consider a fairly standard development environment for Windows.

I previously posted about how to “develop like a pro on Windows” as it seemed to me like most people really failed to understand that a lot of great tools exist for Windows that make developers very effective also on Windows. Since then I’ve bumped into concepts like Nix, a purely functional package manager and have been wondering if we could reach some similar goals with Windows. The things I wanted to see synchronized between all my Windows machines, and automated after a new installation were at least:

So it seems to me like a lot of people don’t seem to value Windows for development. There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about it’s capabilities, availability of tooling, and lack of understanding of what really are the options. This guide will hopefully help you guys see that Windows is a viable option just like anything else, and not just for C#. There’s also a few more generic tips about Windows use not purely useful in development.

PrefaceThis is a set of tips, guidelines, etc. that you should follow to make sure your IT operations run smoothly, securely, and cost-efficiently. You should go through the list and pick the low hanging fruits first, and then see which ones you should implement later. If you’re just starting a new company, most things should be easy to set up right from the start and doing so will help you ensure that things continue to are done right in the future as well, as you need to always accommodate for those decisions.

UPDATE: Project in GitHub Because I wanted to make some updates to this tool, I found it more convenient to move the project to GitHub. Here's the link: https://github.com/lietu/grwu/ Further updates will happen there, and only there. What is this? I was using the NASA image of the day RSS feed to dynamically update the wallpaper on my Windows desktops and realized I wasn't doing that on my linux desktops (which are running Gnome 3).

Cookie Clicker HackThis bookmarklet will make cookie clicker show the prices for items as “price per cookies per second”, so which one is the most cost-efficient purchase will be easy to see. Cookie Clicker HackDrag & Drop that on your bookmarks bar, go to Cookie Clicker and click on it. What are bookmarklets?Bookmarklets are basically snippets of JavaScript code stored in a bookmark. When the bookmark is activated, the JavaScript code is run on the page you are currently on.

What is this? Python has excellent coding standards that everyone should follow (PEP-8) and excellent tool to check for standards-compliancy (pep8). There's also a good tool for checking various errors (e.g. unused imports) called pyflakes. Running these tools manually can easily become too much of a chore, and mass running them after doing a bunch of changes can end up with a lot of issues to be fixed at once making it a chore to fix all the little issues.

Introduction I just recently got a Raspberry Pi, which is a decent piece of hardware, but the fact that it can't really do video playback using any other player than omxplayer left me annoyed. Omxplayer isn't a very nice player, most annoyingly it's missing playlist functionality. To make the Raspberry Pi a bit more useful for me, I decided to make my own playlist manager around omxplayer, and this is it.

What is this? GOG.com is an online store that, among other things, sells a lot of old PC games that are distributed for use with Dosbox. The games come with a Windows (sometimes also Mac) installer, but nothing for Linux. Getting these games to run on Linux sometimes takes a bit more effort, if they're not designed to be run with Dosbox, but when they are it should not be very difficult to get them running.

Introduction If you are hosting a site or multiple sites where performance is more important than that updates are immediately visible, or that the architecture is especially "cool", you might want to think of running Nginx as a reverse proxying cache server. What this approach provides is easily configurable lightning fast serving of your content. What you will need Nginx installed on a server (I'm sure you can find another guide for this) Write access to Nginx configuration directory Main web server listening on non-default port (e.

Preface I was interested in testing out my new homepage server's performance in rather simple terms. I thought bombarding a single URL with Apache Benchmark would distort the results too much, and I also didn't want to load the resources outside my control (e.g. Google Analytics). I made a simple BASH script that loops indefinitely and does a wget call that fetches all the resources and links on my homepage recursively and displays the time it took to do that for each iteration.

Preface I noticed it's annoyingly difficult to get the IP addresses assigned to your network interfaces for scripting purposes. I ended up writing the fairly simple one-liner below that lists all IPv4 addresses (change -4 to -6 for IPv6) in the format "interface-address", e.g. "eth0-192.168.1.1". It also ignores the loopback address since that's generally quite irrelevant. I personally used this to check which interfaces a certain program was communicating over and send me alerts if it uses the wrong interface.

Preface I was interested in testing out my new homepage server's performance in rather simple terms. I thought bombarding a single URL with Apache Benchmark would distort the results too much, and I also didn't want to load the resources outside my control (e.g. Google Analytics). I made a simple BASH script that loops indefinitely and does a wget call that fetches all the resources and links on my homepage recursively and displays the time it took to do that for each iteration.

Jekyll is a tool that can be used to build static HTML websites using a HTML template engine etc., however it's not perfect by itself, and the documentation for the plugins is rather crappy at times. Unfortunately, you will need to install ruby (including -devel packages) and do whatever you need to do to get RubyGems installer. More about Jekyll: http://jekyllrb.com/ Jekyll Asset Pipeline Definitely worth installing is jekyll-asset-pipeline, it makes sure your CSS and JS files are combined and compressed, as well as making sure (with a little help) that LESS, SASS, CoffeeScript etc.

I just recently battled a long time to get my Windows machine to sleep properly. That is, to automatically go to sleep mode after a timeout, not wake up from sleep mode from useless events like keyboard and mouse, and recover from sleep mode successfully. In Linux, pretty much everything worked out of the box, even with exotic-ish hardware (Apple Mac Mini), except for not waking up from useless events.

Getting Windows to play nicely with sleep mode I just recently decided to get my main desktop to finally work with sleep mode properly. It has never worked in the past (the heart of the machine, mobo & cpu, are a couple years old), but now I felt like I want to do something about it. As a quick reference, here are the key details of the machine: OS: Windows 7 Professional CPU: Intel Core i7 920, overclocked RAM: 6GB triple channeled 1600MHz DDR3, OCZ Motherboard: Asus Rampage II Extreme (X58 / ICH10R) GPU: EVGA Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 Audio: Asus Xonar Essence STX SSD: OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 240GB Getting Windows to recover from sleep mode Initially, my issue was that the computer failed to recover from sleep mode.

Initial information I have a FreeNAS box that I use to provide disk space to my VMware ESXi box that has no disks other than the USB stick it boots from. The FreeNAS machine's specifications: Intel Celeron E3300 @ 2.50GHz Gigabyte GA-EG41MF-US2H Intel G41 LGA775 microATX motherboard Corsair Value Select 4GB (2x2048MB) 667MHz DDR2 RAM 3x 3TB Seagate Barracuda 3 TB 64 MB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA III The VMware ESXi machine's specifications:

Here's a simple script to monitor the status of a service via a normal control script such as /etc/init.d/varnishd as commonly found under Linux and BSD based systems .. it should be super simple to modify for most other types of systems, such as systemctl. Just configure, place somewhere on the server, and set a crontab line to run it every now and then. #!/usr/bin/env bash # ----- ------------- ----- # # ----- CONFIGURATION ----- # # ----- ------------- ----- # # Path to control script (usually in rc.

It took me quite a while to get a well working linux dualboot on my Mac Mini (version 4.1, the mid 2010 edition), and wanted to make it easier for others. Most of this should apply to other distributions of Linux, as well as other Intel-based Mac machines. The instructions are a bit rough (didn't plan on this, but turned out to be difficult enough to warrant writing this), but this is roughly how it goes:

Preparation You will need the following tools to complete this process: Virtual Machine Hypervisor, such as VMware Player SSH client, such as Nutty Ubuntu Server disc image This guide is aimed for Windows users, the rest can probably figure out the parts that have only been described for Windows. These steps are likely to change a little when new versions of VMware Player and Ubuntu Server are released, however generally the default settings are sane and you can just use them when in doubt.