Running Linux and working in Cloud and HPC it is common for me to be stumped when problems appear. Indeed that is where the fun is. However, after receiving a link to download some photos from a recent even, I was shocked to see the images were in .heicformat.1 I have never heard of this and was shocked that something as simple as an image file could not be opened easily on my fancy, sleek, XPS-13....
When ChunkHost, a hosting provider I’d been using since the mid-2010s, announced its closure last year, I missed the warning emails. This oversight could have spelled disaster but, on reflection, it was a serendipitous push towards reevaluating my hosting needs and expenses. This experience, while initially seeming like a setback, turned into an exploration of more sustainable and cost-effective hosting solutions. Hosting, especially on dedicated servers or virtual machines, can be a significant overhead for anyone running websites or online projects....
Emacs as a Daemon This guide will get emacs running as a server on Linux systems. This means that each time you load a file emacs is ready and doesn’t need to load. On some systems emacs start up times can be several seconds so having emacs there and ready to go can save you some real time and improve your workflows. I always forget how to do this so this guide is for me more than anyone else!...
Why bother? Static websites are great - tools like Jekyll make building, deploying and editing sites a cinch! So easy in fact it is easy to have sites for multiple projects all running off one server. This is great but can cause issues as manually serving each site on server reboots takes time. Below is an example script that will create a screen, move to the website directory and launch it....
Home is just like work after all It is a shameful reality of the current industrial complex that surrounds science that you cannot always get to your data. This may seem like a silly gripe but it has massive implications to those working everyday on data collection. If I collect some information on a chemical system I want to, more often than not, pull that data out and manipulate, transform or plot that data how I want....
Background It has become clear over the last year of constant emacs use for almost all my work - that this workflow is key to my long term sustainable productivity. Emacs allows for complex tasks to be completed effortlessly with planning, content production and publishing handled without any issues. Importantly customizability is key and baked in. It has also became clear that learning the language of emacs - elisp - is going to be a super useful tool that will allow me the flexibility to continue using this tool indefinably with the agility that I need....
The Use of YASnippet to Super Charge Science Workflows Emacs (specifically the Spacemacs distro) has become my go to tool for almost all my scientific work. Writing and producing documents, organising my day and all data analysis and plotting is now done within emacs. The move away from GUI based applications to a more keyboard orientated workflows has allowed me to create at the speed I think. One of the key tools for that is YASnippet....
Tidal on Linux Tidal is a great way to access a vast, high quality, music collection. Bit rates are significantly higher than other streaming services. It is because of this that many want to use it as the corner stone of the audiophile set ups. The problem? There is limited Linux support. No official GUI application exists for Tidal on Linux and the only way to access music is by the web app....
I have had some issues with crackling sound and Steam on my latest build - notably during Fallout 4. To fix this I came across this post and this video - unfortunately the links in the video are dead. I believe it is caused by high rate sample rate audio being play though low rate kit. For my future reference and for anyone also stumbling across this - I please see a link to my git up which has the pulse audio ....
This week I had the need to create a bootable drive with the aim to breathe some life into an old laptop. Below are the commends and comments to do this using the terminal in Ubuntu. Check for all you mounted drivers using df This will print out all your drives into the terminal - you are looking for the USB drive you want to use as your bootable drive. Typically something like /dev/sdax/ where x is a number....