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DevContainers, VSCode and GitHub Codespaces
15 November 2020
Read moreI've seen quite a bit of chatter later about the GitHub Codespaces feature lately, and I have beta access to it so I thought I'd share my first impressions and make some notes of what I've tried that might be useful to others.
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Ubuntu Command for Mic Mute with Pulsemixer
12 November 2020
Read moreOne of the major problems I run into with video conferencing tools is how many of them are not at all accessible. I'm a keyboard-only user so if I need to hover a pointer in a particular area of the screen and then click an icon to mute ... then I can't do that. And if you mute me when I join because there are a lot of people here, then I can't participate at all. To work around this, I need a one-liner to mute (and unmute) my mic ... so here it is.
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Keyboard-only Web Browser
22 October 2020
Read moreI haven't used a pointing device in over a decade, and I get a lot of questions about how I navigate the web using only the keyboard. The short answer is: Vimium and funnily enough, it's a productivity tool rather than an accessibility tool. Curious? Let me show you around!
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Combine Multiple Field Tags in Go
21 October 2020
Read moreI work a lot with JSON APIs in my Go projects, so almost every struct has some field tags on it to translate AccountID into account_id and that sort of thing. Then one day I needed to load data from config using mapstructure and it took a few attempts with the search engine to find the syntax I needed, so it's here for next time I need it (or in case you need it too).
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Adding Tables of Contents to Markdown
18 October 2020
Read moreOnce any document gets over a certain length, a table of contents can be useful. I have a favourite markdown table-of-contents tool but it usually takes me a trip to the search engine to remember what it is! (tl;dr: github-markdown-toc )
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Package Webpages as Apps with Nativefier
15 September 2020
Read moreThere are a couple of specific web pages I use in separate windows from my other browser tabs, so I can always find them. However this quickly leads to a too-many-browser-windows problem. Instead, I have been turning them into basic standalone applications with a javascript tool: nativefier and I thought I'd share my recipes.
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Create .desktop files for Ubuntu
13 September 2020
Read moreHaving created a couple of .desktop files lately to make launching apps easier, I thought I'd write myself a quick reminder of what I did and how it works. If it's useful to you too, then great! I have one application in a weird path, and another that needs a specific environment variable set for it to work.
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Sharing Screen and Camera from Android to Linux
17 August 2020
Read moreWith all the video calls, twitch streaming and product demo work I've been doing recently, I've been building up a library of tricks for using my android devices within the video content I produce from my laptop, so I thought I'd share. I've worked remotely for many years but I think there's more of us not going back to the office any time soon, so strong video communication skills are important!
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An Intro to Your ESP8266
08 August 2020
Read moreI've been using a microchip on my neopixel shelf project but I kind of set it up, changed one thing, and didn't look at it again until this week. I'd like to have my neopixels do something more interesting than one solid colour or another, so I needed to remind myself of what this thing is and how I do it. These are my notes, for my Ubuntu platform, but you're more than welcome to them!
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Creating a Simple OpenAPI Spec
06 August 2020
Read moreHaving API descriptions in your workflow is a game-changer, but how do you get from nothing to a functioning spec in the first place? I recently made a very simple spec for a very simple API, and thought it might make a good example for anyone looking to create a spec for the first time. OpenAPI specs are very verbose so this very tiny API makes quite a manageable example!
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Using Environments in Postman
23 July 2020
Read moreI'm using Postman more lately and showing off the Environments feature really often. I really like this feature for giving easy ways to handle values I use frequently, but it seems to be a bit of a hidden gem, so I thought I'd write about when I find it useful, in case you do too!
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Planets and Webhooks: a simple Flask app
22 July 2020
Read moreAs a Developer Advocate for an API company, I spend a lot of time talking about APIs and webhooks and HTTP in general. Recently I've been focussing on HTTP tools, but I really wanted a very simple example API that I could use that would return JSON but really let me focus on the tools, not the API. So I created a "Planets and Webhooks" API with a couple of GET endpoints to return JSON data, and another endpoint to receive and log incoming webhook data.