Fastest way to set up and manage an Mkdocs Material project • 09 Mar 2024
If I wouldn’t be able to control myself, I would create a new website every week. Creating a website about … any topic really, helps me structure the knowledge I have or am in the process of collecting about it....
Using bashew in GitHub Actions • 15 Oct 2022
GitHub Actions, used in countless CI/CD setups, are a good example of the ubiquity of bash scripting. Most of the run: lines in an Action YML document are nothing but (a sequence of) bash command lines.
Benchmark: hash functions • 19 Apr 2022
Post #7 in this bash benchmark series,
measuring the speed of common bash text manipulations.
Benchmark: MacOS tr vs GNU gtr • 18 Apr 2022
Post #6 in this bash benchmark series,
measuring the speed of common bash text manipulations.
Benchmark: slugify text in Bash • 15 Apr 2022
Post #5 in this bash benchmark series,
measuring the speed of common bash text manipulations.
Benchmark: romanization in bash • 08 Apr 2022
Post #4 in this bash benchmark series,
measuring the speed of common bash text manipulations.
Benchmark: cut characters in bash • 25 Mar 2022
Post #1 in this bash benchmark series,
measuring the speed of common bash text manipulations.
Bash benchmarks • 24 Mar 2022
When writing bash scripts, one needs to find ways to do things that aren’t built in to bash. String manipulation like lowercase conversion, parsing, removing whitespace… all use tools/binaries built-in to the OS, but not in the language itself. I’m...
Advanced dotenv config files for bash scripts • 25 Apr 2021
A technique commonly used practice in (deployment of) software projects is to put your local configuration, environment variables and secrets in a .env file in the root of your project. This .env file is structured as a one-dimensional lookup table...
Find installation folder for bash scripts • 24 Apr 2021
This is the start of a series on some bash tricks and features that I’ve developed for the bashew bash scripting micro-framework.
Generate individual tag/category/author pages for your Jekyll website • 21 Mar 2021
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...
Detecting excessive SSD wear on Apple Silicon M1 machines • 22 Feb 2021
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...
Every country in the world in 1 (Unsplash) photo • 14 Feb 2021
I wanted to demonstrate the power of my splashmark image markup script and did the following experiment using splashmark, Wikipedia, and Unsplash:
Creating image reveal videos with ffmpeg and primitive (bash) • 21 Jan 2021
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...
Using Homebrew on Apple Silicon M1 natively (bash) • 19 Dec 2020
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.
setver: Package (semver) version management for bash/PHP/Node • 31 Jul 2020
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...
“Bashful Thinking”: a newsletter for bash scripting enthusiasts • 28 Jul 2020
I’ve decided to start a new email newsletter about my favourite tech topic: bash/shell scripting. It’s something I’ve become quite proficient in during the years, and I still discover new tricks, tools or applications every day. So I will bundle...
Best way to upscale low resolution photos • 04 Jul 2020
I’ve been doing some remote shoots recently, as the photographer obviously, and I’ve mainly used FaceTime ‘Live photos’ for captures. The result of such a shoot is a series of .HEIC files (it’s an Apple thing). Each file is a...
Web services in the console (bash) • 06 Jun 2020
I spend a lot of my day in a terminal window, and I love automating stuff with bash scripts. Sometimes those scripts need to do perform actions based on external conditions: location (country), weather, bandwidth speed …
How to do a remote portrait photo shoot • 30 May 2020
COVID19 has had a huge impact of pretty much everything. For portrait photography, the 6-feet-apart, no-travelling, use-mouth-mask lockdown had made it almost impossible to do an in-person photo shoot. But every limit is also a challenge, Is it possible to...
QR Experiments: QR-ized photos • 27 May 2020
This is my 2nd QR Experiments post: make QR-codes from images, also check the first one on QR Roulette!
Making the Pixel Movie Quiz • 07 May 2020
Imagemagick is a command-line tool to create and modify image files. It is an essential program if you want to work with media files (just like ffmpeg and sox). I have used it very often in my career and I...
When the API returns an image • 15 Jan 2020
I see more and more Image-Response GET APIs. With this term I mean: the API is called with a GET URL, and the response is a (JPG/PNG/GIF/WEBP/SVG) image, either directly or after a redirect. So the API can be used...
New project: bash boilerplate generator on toolstud.io • 03 Jun 2018
I like to automate. I like it so much that I will not hesitate to spend 8+ hours on writing a script that replaces 5 minutes of work every month. Most of my automation is for CLI (command line interfaces)....
Idea: Double Vision for 3D cinema • 31 Dec 2012
(I had this idea in June 2011 and wrote this post in Oct 2011, but I decided to wait with publishing until my lovely colleague Sylvia could get the scoop and use it for a marketing action).
“I will you in the night” – Idool 2003 • 28 Jan 2010
At the Pixagogo reunion dinner the other evening, I was reminded by one of my ex-colleagues Steven (‘Beukie‘) that back in 2003 I was having some fun with remixes/mashups. More specifically, I took some vocals of the Belgian “Idool 2003”...
Idea: preview service for URL shorteners • 16 Nov 2009
I was using my iPhone to read my Twitter feed (Twitterrific) and Facebook and when comparing the two, I liked one thing about Facebook that Twitter/Twitterific does not have: when some one posts a URL, you get a preview icon...
The early days of (e)book piracy • 28 Aug 2008
I was thinking about this the other day. Piracy is really big for CDs and DVDs. One of the main reasons is that both media are so easy to digitize. Pop in a CD and in 6 minutes you have...
Screenshots of a DVD with ffmpeg • 08 Feb 2008
I’ve been playing around a lot with video conversion lately and one of the tools I use often is the Swiss armyknife for video manipulation ‘ffmpeg‘. It does format conversion (MPEG1/2/4, Quicktime, AVI …) , rescaling, recompressing, frame rate conversion...
TomTom One: beauty with short breath • 27 Oct 2007
The TomTom One (the ‘old’ model) is my first ever GPS. Overall, an excellent design. I never had to open the manual because it is a very intuitive device. The route calculation is quite fast and accurate, and with the...
Digital cinema advertising and me • 05 Dec 2006
Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while, might have seen some posts on “digital cinema“. I have been researching the topic for more than a year now. And for a reason, of course: it seemed...
More globalisation, please • 12 Sep 2006
A while back I bought the whole suite of Edward Tufte books: “The visual display of quantitative data“, “Envisioning Information” and “Visual Explanations“.
Moldover: Live mashup DJ • 07 Sep 2006
I wrote a post last year “REQ: Live mashup performance tool” on how much fun it would be to be able to do live mashups: mix basslines, drums, guiter riffs and vocals from different songs in real-time. I just found...
Click to hear the MP3 (playlist) • 27 Apr 2006
More than a year ago, I wrote an piece on Playing mp3 with an embedded Flash player. Things change quickly in this area, so it’s time for an update.
What the government can do about spam • 30 Oct 2005
The Belgian Minister of Economy, Marc Verwilghen, recently announced the efforts the Belgian government would take to restore trust in the Internet as a way of doing business. This includes a directory of trustworthy online shops (e.g. in the travel...
