Technical Articles

1 Jan 2020
Software Contributions 2019 A wrap-up of the software contributions I made in 2019, financial and code. Perhaps you’ll consider contributing too.
26 Oct 2019
An Illustrated Guide to Some Useful Command Line Tools A short description and screenshot of some useful command line tools I use that aren’t part of typical POSIX environment.
25 Apr 2019
What I Learnt Building a Lobsters TUI in Rust As a learning and practice exercise I built a crate and TUI for interacting with the Lobsters programming community website.
25 Mar 2019
Cross Compiling Rust for FreeBSD With Docker How to cross-compile Rust projects for FreeBSD using Docker, without emulation or virtual machines.
24 Mar 2019
My First 3 Weeks of Professional Rust Reflecting on the first 3 weeks of writing Rust in my new job.
12 Mar 2019
A Coding Retreat and Getting Embedded Rust Running on a SensorTag I attended a small coding retreat with some friends and worked on running Rust code on a CC2650 based TI SensorTag.
28 Feb 2019
Rebuilding My Personal Infrastructure With Alpine Linux and Docker My story of replacing three servers, across two countries, running two operating systems with a single server running Alpine Linux and Docker.
27 Jan 2019
My Rust Powered linux.conf.au e-Paper Badge For linux.conf.au 2019 I built a digital conference badge using a Raspberry Pi Zero, tri color e-Paper display and a custom Rust program.
14 Jan 2019
Goals and Directions for Rust in 2019 Reflecting on Rust in 2018 and what might be worth focussing on in 2019.
18 Aug 2018
Anatomy of a Great Rust Blog I’ve posted 718 articles to Read Rust. This post shares some insights I’ve gleaned from them, to make your posts as readable and discoverable as possible.
4 Feb 2018
Behind the Scenes of Read Rust The design and operation of the little Rust content aggregator I built.
21 Jan 2018
Introduction to Rust Talk A whirlwind introduction to Rust that I gave at work in two parts: An intro to the language and live coding a little demo program.
7 Jan 2018
Goals and Directions for Rust in 2018 Reflecting on Rust in 2017 and what might be worth focussing on in 2018.
1 Jan 2018
Software Contributions 2017 In 2017 I tried to support more of the projects I use. This is a summary of how I went.
31 Dec 2017
A Cross Platform GUI For Neovim: NeovimGtk Inspired by a post about the macOS Neovim GUI, VimR, I describe the one I use on Linux: NeovimGtk.
21 Oct 2017
Pair Programming My thoughts on full-time pair programming.
28 Sep 2017
Rust Tools Talk A presentation I gave at the September Melbourne Rust Meetup.
28 Sep 2016
Using ripgrep With Vim A few ways to use the ripgrep text search tool within vim.
20 Sep 2015
Open Paths With Line Numbers in Vim A shell function to open path/to/file.txt123 style paths at the specified line in vim.
21 Jun 2015
Custom Slack Shortcuts With Karabiner Making Slack more keyboard friendly.
13 Jan 2013
Speed Up Slow Downloads on iOS with a Proxy or CDN Using a proxy or CDN can dramatically improve download speeds on an iOS device.
22 Jan 2012
Home NAS Powered by FreeBSD and ZFS Building a home NAS with a HP MicroServer running FreeBSD and ZFS.
22 Jan 2012
Little Linux Router Box Solving my Internet connection issues with a PC Engines ALIX single board computer and OpenWRT.
12 Dec 2011
Fun With objc_setAssociatedObject and UIAlertView Using objc_setAssociatedObject in a blocks based UIAlertView wrapper.
8 Dec 2011
The iOS Launch Image is Not a Splash Screen Reasons why the launch image in iOS apps is not intended to be a splash screen with your pretty logo on it.
25 Sep 2011
Add a Custom Search Engine to Safari How to add a custom search engine to Safari without nasty hacks or input managers.
28 Aug 2011
Strip Trailing Whitespace in Xcode 4 How to create a behaviour in Xcode 4 to strip trailing whitespace from all git tracked files with changes.
28 Aug 2011
Monochrome Thumbnails Generating monochrome thumbnails with a color rollover from my Flickr feed
20 Feb 2011
Railscasts Xcode Theme A port of the Railscasts TextMate theme to Xcode.
28 Jan 2011
Generating XML With node.js Examples of using my genx node module to generate an Atom feed and Sphinx xmlpipe2 stream in node.js.
26 Jan 2011
Ad-Hoc Webserver in a Directory Options for quickly serving the contents of a directory via HTTP.
26 Jan 2011
Automatically Build and Test With Guard How to use guard to automatically build and test a node.js C++ module.
22 Jan 2011
Mac OS X Package Management With pkgsrc Some information about pkgsrc and why you’d want to use it on Mac OS X.
27 Sep 2010
Weather Station Software After trouble with the wview weather station software I built my own solution to log and publish weather conditions.
4 Aug 2010
How to Install Consolas on Mac OS X Concise summary of where to download and how to install the Consolas font on Mac OS X.
13 Jul 2010
New Design Details of the switch from Wordpress and the design goals for this site.
11 Mar 2010
Installing Debian With gPXE and netboot.me How to install Debian without an installation disk over the Internet.
13 Feb 2010
git’s Object Store Efficiency Hubert Feyrer claims git’s storage efficiency is much worse than CVS’s. I attempt to show it’s not.
8 Feb 2010
iPad and the Future of Computing My thoughts on iPad a couple of weeks after its announcement.
13 Jan 2010
Clone git Repo on Non-Standard Port How to clone a git repository via SSH on a non-standard port.
9 Jan 2010
Updated Applications A follow up to, "Update Expectations", in which I check in on some neglected apps.
19 Sep 2009
Font Smoothing in Snow Leopard How regain control of the font smoothing weight in Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
18 Aug 2009
The Art of Backup Details of the various tools I use and have used for personal data backup.
17 Aug 2009
Idea: Adaptive shell An idea for a shell that learns completion behaviour.
16 Aug 2009
Local Package Management with GNU Stow How to manage custom built software without polluting the system directories with GNU stow.
12 Aug 2009
Temperature Logger Project Some details about an Arduino based temperature logger I’m building.
18 Jul 2009
Scraping NAB Internet Banking with Mechanize How to scrape the NAB Internet banking site with Ruby.
29 Jun 2009
Programming Fonts Recap A look the some of the favoured programming fonts available.
28 Jun 2009
VirtualBox News Atom Feed Creating an Atom feed of VirtualBox updates with Ruby.
17 May 2009
Spider a Site With wget Using sitemap.xml How to request all the pages in a sitemap.xml file with wget.
15 May 2009
Exclude Directories From TextMate Side Bar for Faster Find in Project Some shell magic to exclude directories from the TextMate project drawer.
23 Apr 2009
Capturing an RTMP Video Stream with FLV Recorder How to capture an RTMP, Flash video stream with FLV Recorder.
30 Mar 2009
Bash Git Completion with Mac Ports Enabling bash completion for git with MacPorts.
30 Mar 2009
Consolas on Mac Update A follow-up to, "Install Consolas on Mac OS X", identifying the need to set the font smoothing style for optimum clarity.
13 Mar 2009
MLUG VirtualBox Workshop The Melbourne Linux User’s Group are hosting a VirtualBox workshop.
12 Mar 2009
Free Virtualisation With VirtualBox A small review of Sun’s freely available virtualisation software.
4 Mar 2009
Mac Remote Desktop Connection Without Installer Install the Mac version of Microsoft’s Remote Desktop client without all the other rubbish they include.
3 Mar 2009
Install Microsoft’s Consolas Font on Mac OS X Install the Consolas fixed width font on Mac OS X.
2 Mar 2009
My First New Site is Live My first Trike project, "Less Wrong", goes live
2 Mar 2009
Debian 5.0 ‘Lenny’ Released Small post noting the release of Debian 5.0.
21 Jan 2009
Determining Non-Automatically Installed Debian Packages How to determine packages that were explicitly installed on Debian/Ubuntu.
6 Jan 2009
The iPhone Headphones Have a Button Notes on the operation of the button built-in to the iPhone headphones.
21 Nov 2008
iPhone Case Details of the Mossimo iPhone case I found and its flaw.
21 Nov 2008
Progress Update An update on my indie software work.
23 Sep 2008
Pimping Vim on Windows How to make Vim on Windows more pleasant to use.
22 Sep 2008
zsh, Cygwin and Insecure Directories How to fix directories that zsh reports as insecure on Cygwin.
5 Sep 2008
Update Expectations It seems common to suggest an application will recieve updates without them materialising. This is a short list of some applications that fall into this category.
17 Aug 2008
iPhone Gripe: Truncated Song Titles The iPhone isn’t flawless. It truncates song titles, which its iPod predecessors did not.
12 Aug 2008
Pondering "Sent from my iPhone" Some thoughts and a solution to the default, "Sent from my iPhone", email signature.
15 Jul 2008
iPhone Tips From the User Guide A collection of useful tips compiled from the iPhone User Guide.
8 Jul 2008
Comments to Vodafone on Lack of iPhone Information Vodafone dropped the ball on the iPhone 3G launch. I sent an email to them but never got a response.
2 Jul 2008
Comment Feeds in WordPress How to find the comments feed on a Wordpress blog.
28 May 2008
To Title Case Bookmarklet A bookmarklet made from David Gouch’s Javascript implementation of John Gruber’s Title Case Perl script.
23 May 2008
Stop Vim Completion Searching Included Files How to stop vim searching all included files when applying word completion.
20 May 2008
Death to the ‘feed:’ URI Scheme The feed: URI scheme is annoying and unnecessary, can people please stop using it.
24 Apr 2008
Expand glob in variable within shell script How to expand a glob pattern in a shell script.
16 Apr 2008
MP3 Decoder Libraries Compared Comparison of the MP3 decoding performance of Core Audio, MAD and mpg123
15 Apr 2008
Women’s Weekly Getting in on the Linux Action Photo of a penguin cake in a Women’s Weekly cook book that looks an awful lot like Tux.
6 Apr 2008
Pizza Style Delivery for Technical Books Why can’t books be delivered with the same timliness as pizzas?
27 Mar 2008
How to create an empty tar file How to create an empty tar file with BSD tar, GNU tar and Solaris tar
5 Mar 2008
WebKit for Keynote Small note from the WebKit mailing list suggesting last minute revisions are made to the software for Stevenote’s.
5 Mar 2008
Windows Silverlight Installation Experience Details on my terrible experience attempting to install Microsoft Silverlight on Windows.
4 Feb 2008
Seeking Application Ideas Lost for a Mac development idea. I seek suggestions from the Internet.