Use simple .txt files for organising tasks

I am so sick and tried of changing task management systems, I will just be using plain .txt files from now on. In the last 10 years, I have tried so many different systems for organising my work and my personal life and yet I’ve not been able to keep using one of them after a few weeks or months. After all this time I think I’ve finally come to the realisation that they all suffer from the same inadequacies.

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Live reload Go with air

It can be a real effort to bring yourself to write articles to maintain a healthy blog, and sometimes the simple articles are best. Therefore, I just want to take a quick few moments to talk about a tool that I just cannot live without now-a-days, when writing Go code, I am always live-reloading with Air in the background. It’s really valuable for developers to be able to get fast feedback on the code that they are writing.

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Use Firefox as a universal web chat app

Chat that is always compatible, updated, and integrates with browser extensions. Too many chat apps — can’t change that. The amount of chat applications and protocols out there now-a-days is getting absolutely crazy. It’s like in the 1990s, when we had ICQ, AIM, IRC, and others. For a little while, I felt like things were getting better — I got down to just 2 chat apps!… Fast-forward to today — the chat apps I need are unfortunately even more than in the 90s.

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My desk has 6 monitors

I want to explain how I use this setup, and how I got here. Perhaps I will encourage you, to experiment with your desk and workflow. Taken in approx Mar 2021 Pictured above, is my desk. It does indeed have 6 monitors. It also has 4 computers with 3 operating systems (2x Linux, 1x Windows — for gaming, 1x Mac — for iOS development). I don’t intend to brag, or show off, or try and say that this set-up is absolutely essential for me and that nothing else would work.

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Recompiling a Linux terminal — a story of time well invested

My desktop after the story; i3, st, and some other stuff. It was worth it, but I need to explain how I got here. It’s about 2pm on a Friday afternoon, my week of meetings is finally drying up. I have a few hours in my calendar the rest of the day — and I’m not going to spend it catching up on more emails. I want to fill these last couple of hours with something a bit more fun, so I pick up the Ansible collection I was hacking code on and get to work.

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All storage will fail, so all my files are distributed & tracked in Git Annex. ❤

This post is about how, and why, I use Git Annex to implement my 3-2-1 backup strategy backup strategy. In summary, that is; At least 3 copies of the data In at least 2 different storage mediums With at least 1 copy offsite In practicality, I’ve used Git Annex to implement more like a 9-5-3 backup strategy and track everything nicely. This strategy should mean that I should not ever lose files that I care about ever again.

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Speed up your command line navigation

Speed up your command line navigation Photo by Kevin Ku from Pexels Knowing a few key shortcuts can have a surprising impact. As someone who sits frequently with others over a command line to help debug code and navigate servers, it’s easy to become frustrated on their behalf at how cumbersome things can be when you may not know time-saving shortcuts. Here are some essential shortcuts and key tips to help you speed up your command line usage.

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