Art of the dotflag -- `.nojekyll`, `.gitkeep` and their ilk

This weekend I’ve been procrastinating playing the long game by getting some nice workflows set up for my TIL content repository and its associated website (cf Context, below). If all goes well, by the time I hit :wq on this TIL, it should invisibly trigger 2 Git commits, a Hugo build, and then appear on the site fully-birthed. One of the more interesting patterns I noticed was the .nojekyll empty file which I had to build to get GH Pages to stop tussling with my Hugo Action for turf....

November 19, 2023

A good place to symlink local builds

I’ve been a big fan of both spaced repetition in general and the Anki spaced repetition system in particular for a long time now. So today, after a fresh new install and blinging out of Ubuntu 23.10, I decided to take the next step, as I often do with programs I use a lot, and try to build and compile it myself. This turned out to be pretty easy! The docs warn that ....

November 18, 2023

No such thing as a Post-Push Hook

Tonight I was hacking away at some more little automations to make this TIL nice and presentable over at https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/. Git has a wonderful system called “hooks” which live under .git/hooks/, come loaded with examples so you can remember how they all work, and – surprisingly – don’t contain a local post-push hook! There’s post-receive, but that expects to be able to run a script on the server side – not helpful when I’m pushing to one of Github’s many, many anonymous boxes....

November 18, 2023

Multi-line string literals in Fish

The Fish shell has… interesting syntax for multi-line string literals. The only way I can reliably remember is to literally write them as multi-line literals, which does make a certain kind of brutalist sense: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 function kiitos set thankyou '--- kiitos kaynnista ja tervetuloa uduelleen ---' echo $thankyou end kiitos reliably prints 1 2 3 4 --- kiitos kaynnista ja tervetuloa uduelleen --- , but man does it look funky to me....

November 17, 2023

Today I Learned (TIL) I learn a lot of new things every day. At some point I decided I wanted to have a public record of some of them, so I wrote a shell script to let me open a terminal, type til, and immediately jot down whatever little tidbit I just came across. This repo is the result of that. Quickstart Trouble with all the programs I run in my various ....