Generate individual tag/category/author pages for your Jekyll website

I’ve been migrating more and more of my websites to Jekyll static sites, from WordPress. The advantages are clear:

• version management with git suits me (it’s how I develop software).
• deployment/hosting with GitHub Pages is very easy and can be automated
• the security of having a static site (i.e. no visitor/hacker can change it) is a relief
• sure, WordPress has plugins and comments, but that has become more of a burden than a feature for me.

Detecting excessive SSD wear on Apple Silicon M1 machines

Some more professional users of the new M1 Macbooks are experiencing extremely high drive writes over relatively short time. The most severe cases have “consumed” about 10-13% of the maximum warrantable TBW (Total Bytes Written) value of the SSDs (given their capacity & using values for equivalent market-available NVMe drives).

• Feb 17, 2021 linustechtips.com

Every country in the world in 1 (Unsplash) photo

I wanted to demonstrate the power of my splashmark image markup script and did the following experiment:

Creating image reveal videos with ffmpeg and primitive (bash)

One of the projects I started during the lockdown is @squaredforwork which is now named “Guess the movie?” . It is based on years of experimenting with image manipulation and information reduction. Basically: how much visual information do you need to recognise a (familiar) image? I mostly worked with movie posters, since those are often universally recognisable images. Some examples of earlier tests might give you an idea (working with large square pixels here: Pixel Movie Quiz):

Running a CPU benchmark on Apple Silicon M1 (bash)

When I started working with my Mac Mini M1, I felt it was faster, but I couldn’t really compare with a proper benchmark. I work a lot with video so I created an Apple (M1 and older) benchmark that is focused on CPU-heavy video programs: ffmpeg and primitive.

Using Homebrew on Apple Silicon M1 natively (bash)

After reading all the raving reviews online about the new Apple M1-based Mac computers, and after losing too much time with my overheating MacBook Pro 2013 that’s on its last legs, I caved and bought a Mac Mini M1.

Private repos on Laravel Forge: Spark and Mailcoach

I’m developing a new service and I’ve decided to go all-in on Laravel. Not only am I developing the application in Laravel, and using ready-made components like Laravel Spark (SaaS user management and payment) and Spatie Mailcoach (mailing server), I also deploy to DigitalOcean with Laravel Forge. At 12$/month (for the ‘Hobby’ plan), even if it saves me only 15 minutes of time every month, that’s already worth it.

Help de horeca: unlockdown.be

België gaat door zijn tweede lockdown voor het ogenblik. Alle cafés en restaurants zijn gesloten, het enige wat de horeca nog kan doen om de kost te verdienen is afhaal en levering van maaltijden. Voor sommigen is dit de eerste keer dat ze dit moeten organiseren. Maar het is dat of niks verdienen, terwijl hun vaste kosten wel doorlopen.

Splashmark: easy Unsplash image markup on the command line (bash)

See this photo below? It was created with one, albeit rather long, command line:

setver: Package (semver) version management for bash/PHP/Node

When you’re creating software packages that will be used by other people, you need to get your versioning in order. For PHP libraries, this means: both the version number in composer.json as well as the git tag for Github/Bitbucket. For node.js projects, the version is kept by npm in package.json. It was always too easy to make small mistakes. So I decided to make a bash script <strong>semver.sh</strong> to manage it for me.