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Potpourri

Keyboard

  • Keyboard modification can improve coding efficiency
    • Remapping keys, e.g. caps lock to ctrl or esc
    • Mapped commands to new terminal, sleeping computer, etc.
  • Keyboard software

Daemons

  • Daemons: processes always running in the background, names often end with “d”
    • e.g. sshd is the SSH daemon, listens to incoming requests
  • systemd: system daemon, can be used to run/set up daemon processes
    • systemctl status = list currently running daemons
    • systemctl also has enable, disable, start, stop, restart
    • Accessible interface to enable or configure new daemons
  • cron: daemon that can perform scheduled tasks

FUSE

  • FUSE: filesystem in user space, allows user level code to be execute arbitrary actions during filesystem operations
    • sshfs: open locally remote files/directory through an SSH connection
    • rclone: mount cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive, and open data locally
    • gocryptfs: encrypted overlay system.\ - files are stored encrypted but once the FS is mounted they appear as plaintext in the mountpoint
    • kbfs: mistributed filesystem with end-to-end encryption. You can have private, shared and public directories
    • borgbackup: mount your deduplicated, compressed and encrypted backups for ease of browsing

Backups

  • Every file you care about should have a backup, can disappear at any moment
    • Hardware failure (don’t store backup on same drive)
    • External drive can be lost due to property damage
    • Synchronization/mirroring, e.g. Dropbox will not protect against file corruption or deletion, since changes will be reflected on service
  • Features of a good backup
    • Versioning: able to access history of changes, allowing for recovery
    • Deduplication: only store incremental changes to reduce storage use
    • Security: what info would someone need to have in order to read data or modify/delete it?
  • Verify regularly that backups can be used to recover data, don’t blindly trust
  • Backups should also be used for cloud data, info attached to online accounts
    • Maintain offline copies of this info

APIs

  • Services you interact with on day-to-day usually have APIs that allow you to programatically access their data
  • API format is usually a structured URL, like api.service.com
    • Can be queried via GET request with curl
    • Responses usually come in JSON form and can be piped through jq to get what you want
  • Some use authentication methods, usually “OAuth”, to distribute tokens that can only be used for specific purposes
  • IFTTT allows chaining services together

Common Command-line Flags/Patterns

  • --help = usage info/documentation
  • --version, -V = display program version info
  • --verbose, -v = more output, i.e. debug; more v’s mean more output (-vvv)
  • --quiet, --silent = opposite of --verbose
  • -r = opt into recursive behavior
  • - = provided instead of file name, meaning stdin or stdout instead of file
  • -- = tells command that everything after should not be read as a flag, so flag-like inputs will be read as inputs
  • “Dry run” flag = representation will vary; runs tool without making changes, saying what it would have done
  • “Interactive” mode = sometimes -i; will give confirmation prompt before it does an action that can’t be undone

Window Managers

  • “Tiling” window managers make sure windows never overlap, and are instead arranged as tiles on the screen (like tmux)
    • Windows can be toggled through with keyboard shortcuts, allowing for minimal/no use of mouse

VPNs

  • VPN best-case: change internet service provider, make traffic seem like it’s coming from somewhere else
  • Overall not that secure; instead of trusting internet service provider, trusting the provider of VPN

Desktop Automation

  • Hammerspoon is a desktop automation framework for macOS allowing you to hook Lua scripts into OS functionality
    • e.g. bind hotkeys to window movement, create a menu bar button, etc.
  • Linux will have equivalents for most things

GitHub

  • Contributions to GitHub repos come in the form of issues or pull requests
    • Issues: usually reporting bugs or requesting a new feature, no reading or writing code
    • Pull request: usually done by forking a repo that you don’t have write permissions to, implementing desired changes, then creating a pull request to hopefully merge changes into upstream repo