harsh has been a surprisingly good accountability watchdog for forging and keeping my habits. What started out as a simple parser has turned into an indispensible tool for helping me get longer range goals done in life. Some simple changes have made it even better for long term goals and tracking.
Be your own streaming service. Free yourself from bad content and choice paralysis. Curation and focus beats unending libraries. Easy setup.
Working with startups for over a decade may have spoiled me. API Developer experience has come a long way in that time, SaaSifying backends to make building companies efficient, logical, and consistent.
Sadly, after months doing “science stuff” my feeling is this is a major missed opportunity in scientific projects and academia (and to be fair, few scientists building these apis are software developers by trade).
In many cases though it feels like it could be better and is impeding scientific progress. And something large scientific and research-based organizations should be paying attention to since it flies in the face of their core missions.
Coming back to using Python and Pandas from GoLang has made me aware of the quirks of using dataframes in the place of typed data structures.
While pandas has great convenience features for basic data manipulations on tables, munging get trickier in places you’d want to use a map or hash in other languages. Actually common, and while pandas has a MultiIndex feature, it is a mistake to try to use these with the common Python iterator pattern for star in stars: syntax. Doing this in pandas on cmplex, large datasets can be inefficient and slow. Functions are the faster, more efficient way to do this.
I’m happy to announce the open source release of harsh today.
Harsh is habit tracking for geeks . A simple, minimalist CLI for tracking and understanding habits. Build great habits. Break bad ones.
Why? Habits, both good and bad, make us. We are what we do habitually. And what we do habitually ends up being what we accomplish .
You can grab harsh most easily via homebrew on OSX or linux with a simple:
With COVID-extra spring cleaning time, a PSA post
on updating your security keys. We’re going to move your ssh and gpg keys from RSA algos to the more compact, efficient ECC (Elliptical Curve Cryptography) keys of ED59515. This is how you create them and how to swap them out on services and tools you use.
Most security experts now say to switch from RSA keys to using curves derived from the mathematical properties of elliptical curves, ECC (Elliptical Curve Cryptography). Increasing computing power, has made RSA style keys below 4096 bits vulnerable as well as their now being purpose-made tools around cracking passwords on those secret keys (there are countermeasures).
I’ve been using an early 2016 Macbook 12" for 4 years now. It’s been a fantastic laptop and my biggest issue has been not being able to find another piece of hardware I like as much. I finally had to replace it with a maxed out Macbook Air as the closest substitute, but still missing the Macbook. I decided to put Linux on it to see if I might still be able to resurrect it as a daily driver.
While I’ve been using passpie for some time as a CLI password manager, it lacked mobile and browser integration and an ecosystem for leveraging other tools. This is what I replaced it with duplicating the functionality range you’d see in commercial apps like 1Password and Dashlane, while being free, open source, cross platform, more portable, and developer-friendly.
Often, oldest solutions to problems are the best. They provide a common, battle-tested standard for everyone to work with. Pass, the standard unix password manager has been around for ages and follows the unix philosophy of a simple, robust tool which does one thing well and integrates with other tools for composable toolchains.
For those who followed my original post a year ago on how to get a site up with a static site generator, serverlessly, that is blazing fast, you’re going to need to renew your security certificate soon. This is how that’s done through Amazon Certificate Manager via Let’s Encrypt.
In truth, Amazon’s Certificate Manager (ACM) does a good job of taking something that used to be a painful, nail-biting, horrible experience around changing your web site’s SSL cert and makes it much easier. Especially if you’re running your own domain, ACM combined with the geniuses at Lets Encrypt , it’s now semi-painless (with a little knowledge) to secure your sites with SSL. It’s not obvious, however, how to change or renew once you’re set up, so we’ll doing the walkthrough.