An Amusing Shell Trick

Sometimes a function takes arguments passed down from a caller like this:

my_fun() {
  do_something_fun "$@"
}

On occasion you need …

Area vs Project

My main takeaway from Building a Second Brain is to take more care to distinguish Areas and Projects. The author gives these definitions of …

Apache AGE

Today I learned of Apache AGE, a PostgreSQL extension that adds graph database capabilities. It looks like the right tool for my GraphRAG …

Kakoune Client Server

Today I deployed a variation on the “1 session per project” implementation from the Kakoune wiki. My version of the script is …

Lean Coffee Is Underused

A simple technique for running a meeting with a dynamic agenda is Lean Coffee. It surprises me how few people have run one.

I presently use …

Dev in a Jail

I work a lot on FreeBSD and have made increasing use of jails over time. The bastille and rocinante tools from Christer Edwards make this …

TIL vs TIW

An oddity of producing TIL blog entries is that they rarely match the TIL claim. At least it’s that way for me, and I suspect most who …

Search Path and Extensions

Using search_path to implement polymorphism is one of those conveniences in PostgreSQL that can bite hard. Relying on it to select the …

Man Page in Plain Text

Here is a command to print a man page in plain text:

man -P cat page | col -b

This uses cat as the pager, and strips backspace characters …

OCR via LLM

My stepfather has a box of newspaper clippings from long ago and wants to create digital copies. I asked him to send me a scan. It was an …