I deal with computers, hence I want things to work the most boring and reliable way possible, with automation, procedures, scripts, not through magic.
Hence, while I love tools such as Atuin, I've a problem with their slogan "Making your shell magical" and generally speaking with any product using such selling argument, especially AILLM-based products.
For this reason, I'm usually against any kind of black box and one-for-everything tools and platforms that want to ease our lives by hiding the complexities. I think that the only result we get out of those abstractions is complexity, pain, and a culture of incompetence and dependability. I mean, if you want to deal with technology, at least you should understand it.
In the end, it's not all magic [1][2], but it can feel magic for sure once we lack understanding. Magic feels shiny and appealing after all, its antonyms say it all.
At work, there exist an onboarding procedure targeted towards new developers in the team, and this procedure relies on scripts which were left untouched for way too long. The bad things : the procedure is broken but nobody dares to fix it, instead the old timers in the team share dirty hacks and workarounds with the newcomers.
Once you face such problem, the only solution is to address the root causes, not the symptoms. I choose to take a look at the procedure, run it again and again after each attempted improvement, cut it piece by piece, shred or rewrite what seems unreliable and suspicious.
Magic exists, but Iβve never seen any in software. Problems are logical. Nothing is impossible. You can solve this problem.1
As a software engineer, please don't fix symptoms. Don't get too used to deal with crap and unsolved problems. Don't be lazy, don't accept the status quo, make the hard work to understand and solve the problems. Set your focus on understanding things deeper. Enhance your and everyone's knowledge. Be a firefighter against ignorance, and help educate your peers to be better at understanding why things work or doesn't.
Sometimes, especially at night, I can't help but I feel the need to hunt down a topic and explore any link in my way til I reach an answer or a dead end.
Sometimes I publish those findings in Shaarli.
This time it was about researching a minimalist tool for blogging, something like bashblog or mkws.
It's not always a victory. Maybe next time. After a good rest.
I'm following Joy of Tech comic via RSS in Miniflux but the image was never loading.
I found half a solution on this blog post of Jan-Lukas Else, unfortunately the proposed solution fails probably as a consequence of some changes in the format of Joy of Tech pages.
This page is regularly updated. Feel free to use the scripts and take ownership of them. You can support me through Support of course :-)
I'm avid of content curation using RSS feeds. Let me share some of my tips here and some code. This is a living document so please come back for new tips π and explore my other articles on this topic.
Some of those tips rely on Userscripts which are snippets of code executed automatically on web pages, and usually it's very handy to customize your navigation. I'm using the Custom JavaScript block in Miniflux Settings. But some scripts won't work because of reliance on external resources, and in that case I'm using Tampermonkey for special cases that require loading external resources (think CSP & co).
Translate entries (EN->FR).
As a Belgian product, I speak French and English and can get ouf of trouble in Dutch as well. Yet even if I read mostly in English, I like from time to time to relax my brain and read in French which I speak natively.
My user scripts calls SimplyTranslate and thus clicking this button at the bottom of english articles...
Filter categories (remove empty ones) using Custom JavaScript block
There is by default no distinction between categories with or without content, and it can be annoying. I made a user script to remove categories with no content to read.
Before applying the script, we have some categories, including one with (0) unread entries.
After
The category with (0) unread entries is hidden.
Feed organizer - using Tampermonkey
This one is for grouping together all feed entries by feed/author in the main on unread, read, and starred pages. I needed this one because by default, in unread tab, the feed entries are mixed all together and I often wanna consume content per feed/author and not in chronological order.
Distinct boring from interesting feeds thanks to objective ranking - with Custom JavaScript in global settings
When opening the "Show all entries" view of a feed, this trick will show you if you shall keep this feed or not. The classification is based on the ratio of starred entries vs total. In this case, clearly, my assistant tells me it's quite π₯± boring. Other values are: Thinking π (in case we lack data), Interesting π (we star a lot of items), Thinking π€ (in case we stared at least some entries). Feel free to make it yours and customize the behavior!
This is a trick that works well with the majority of feeds so you can fetch the whole article content in your reader instead of just the excerpt.
Filter feed entries by title / content
I've customize the feed settings to exclude specific keywords, and on top of this I've also global rules which apply to all feeds, for excluding feed entries when keywords are found in their content or title. This makes it easy to exclude clickbait uninteresting or depressing content π
In this case I follow news with heavy metal album releases and I'm excluding specific genre like Death Metal. I'm also abusing the feature to avoid being spammed with recurrent news like Olympic games (Paris 2024). Finally there are already many reasons for me to be anxious, and I do not need more. The last rule saves me from the useless negative news. I keep fine tuning the list and I could improve this by including terms from public blacklists, like this.
Entry sorting - Application settings
This is a setting that helps well to decrease the FOMO-scrolling, by ensuring the top of your unread list stays the same. So it is very simple, sort by Older entries first! Easy.
Filter short or long entries using Custom JavaScript rules
Sometimes I just have so much time and it is impossible to read long articles, so here is my life saver. This will hide all entries not matching the filter. I've added those filters on every page so I can focus on (e.g) short reads at the cost of 1 click only. Very practical when in a rush. The short entries will be highlighted in green. The long entries will be highlighted in red.
Yesterday (Aug 4, 2024), on a Sunday, I went on a trip in my loved Brussels, to complete my CD collection. Here are the spots I have explored and what you can expect about them. Disclaimer : I'm trying to get most value for money I'm often looking for second hands records π and also I don't buy only Heavy Metal... but I get a lot of energy from listening to Thrash Metal π€π» !
This is a must-visit one, with lot of brand new CD and Vinyls records. Not a lot of Heavy Metal among the CDs. Difficult to find second hand CDs. Most of the CD records cost average 18-20 Eur, vs 11 for oldies and promoted items. There is more on 2nd floor, including a section for second hand CD records with some Rock/Heavy Metal titles. But it's very difficult to see them because they are packed so tight together.
π Note: Some nice CDs, but their Heavy Metal section is very tight and they have some Metal titles mixed within the Pop & Rock section. They have lot of Vinyls which makes sense.
