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 …

A Useful Shell Pattern

If you work at the unix command line you probably execute pipelines of programs to test ideas. It’s part of the unix way. Sometimes …

Split for Embedding

Different embedding models have different limits on input tokens. When you want to create embeddings for a large corpus, one major annoyance …

Checking Make Vars

If your make target recipes use make variables you may want to test that they are set before using them. This would look something like …

Sqitch Templates

Sqitch has a template mechanism that follows the same design pattern as its migration files. This makes it easy to manage templates with …

Variables in Sqitch

Sqitch supports variables in the config file like this:

[target "foo"]
    engine = pg
    uri = your-connection-string-here …

PostgreSQL Types by Reference

When writing a function to work with a specific table structure, you may have to match the argument types with table columns. If a table …

Exit Codes in psql

In PostgreSQL certain commands are forbidden in transactions or functions, and lack IF NOT EXISTS variants. Examples include CREATE DATABASE …

Second Brain

Someone recently told me about Building a Second Brain. The book presents a “CODE” approach: Capture, Organize, Distill, …