My friend Dashaun (@dashaun) turned me onto this very handy utility. It's amazing. Want to have arbitrary environment variables at your finger tips when working on projects? Tired of having to lovingly craft environment variables to pour into your IDE's run configuration? Check out direnv ..read more

A couple of years ago, my beloved Shiftit application stopped doing the right thing. Shiftit, if you don't know, is a window manager that gives me keybindings to move windwos around on macOS. It's a treasure, and gives me the kind of window management I'd become accustomed to in Linux and even -gasp (!) - Windows ..read more

In a previous post, I alluded to my need for more wired connectivity on my home Wi-Fi router. Here's why: I wanted to plugin a Starlink hub to adapt my Google Nest thermostats to work with Apple Home automation. Many years ago, I wanted things to work well together, so I decided to go all-in on the Apple ecosystem ..read more

After moving to a more spacious apartment in San Francisco at the height of the pandemic in 2020, my trusty Apple Airport Extreme wireless router struggled to keep up with the new dimensions. My daughter's room was on the opposite end of condo as the ethernet drop was. Enter Amazon's Eero mesh routers. I was initially hesitant about Amazon's recent acquisition of Eero, but dove in feet-first anyway. I set up the main gateway by the ethernet and added two beacons—one in the hallway and another in the living room—to boost the signal. It was decent - but not perfect - and the limited ports for wi ..read more

In 2022, I bought a Sony A7S iii for use in producing my YouTube videos ( see Spring Tips (@SpringTipsLive) and Coffee Software (@coffeesoftwareshow)). I did the normal things. I installed the Sony Imaging Edge software, which let me launch, configure settings on the camera, and start and stop recordings, all from within my macOS environment. It was OK, but it was only, in effect, a proxy for the mechanisms for controlling the camera on the camera's menu systems. I also installed the Sony Imaging Webcam application. It does something slightly different: it lets me use the Sony A7S iii as a web ..read more

hey, while Gradle doesn't officially support Java 21, you can still build and work with Spring Boot on Java 21 ..read more

It's 2023 and you know nothing about Java. How do you get started? Try this ..read more

Ever wanted to publish an artifact to your instance of the excellent Artifactory artifact repository.. except directly, using curl? You have? What's wrong with you? I know why I need to do it and I'm not proud ..read more

I know this should probably be common knowledge, but I always want to find a way to do this, and always find it, and then forget it, and the cycle continues ..read more

I've been working around the clock - like 20 hours in two days so far! - to move my various online properties (like joshlong.com and bootifulpodcast.fm) to a new Kubernetes cluster and it has been.. painful. The code still runs fine but so much of the work of getting the thing onlioe in the first place is made more difficult by the fact that, basically, the world's changed. There are externalities that have made moving to a new platform shall we say interesting? Things like the older beta APIs no longer being available on the managed Kubernetes cluster, or the default branch on Github changing ..read more