Kirsle.net
I blog about anything I find interesting, and since I have a lot of varied interests, my blog entries are kind of all over the place. You can browse my tags to sort them by topic and see which ones I frequently write about, or the archive has a complete history of my posts, dating back to 2008!
Besides my blog, I have pages for my creative projects, which are linked to on the navigation bar.
I write a lot about Linux and Android, Minecraft, and I like to rant about stuff. Generally anything that makes me curious. Also check out my Bookmarks for all sorts of cool websites about various topics I'm interested in.
For the geeks: this website respects your privacy and doesn't run any third party ads or analytics. This site speaks HTTP and doesn't require any JavaScript to work.
Principle of Least AstonishmentIn user interface and software design, the principle of least astonishment states that "if a necessary feature has a high astonishment factor, it may be necessary to redesign the feature." It means that your user interface should behave in a way that the user expects, based on their prior knowledge of how similar interfaces behave.
This is a rant about Mac OS X.
This is a cool tip I picked up from checking out other peoples' Go projects.
When you're new to Go, the documentation tells you about $GOPATH which tells Go where to install packages and where the source codes to your project and its dependencies live. A lot of people might set $GOPATH to be $HOME/go, and work on their projects out of ~/go/src/github.com/myname/myproject.
If you're a JavaScript developer (in the Node.js world), you're probably used to typing in commands like sudo npm install -g gulp-cli (unless you installed Node via Homebrew on Mac OS X so that your local user account owns /usr/local). But I never liked the idea of having files installed under /usr/local (root-owned or otherwise) that my package manager didn't know about, and would prefer to have these global npm commands installed into a user-specific root instead.
Here's how to set this up.
First, edit your .bashrc (or .bash_profile or .zshrc) to add some environment variables:
# Node/npm
export NPM_PACKAGES="${HOME}/.npm-global-pkg"
export NODE_PATH="${NPM_PACKAGES}/lib/node_modules:${NODE_PATH}"
export PATH="${NPM_PACKAGES}/bin:$PATH"
What this does:
$NPM_PACKAGES is a variable we use so we don't have to define the path more than once (Node/npm doesn't use this variable itself). We want our global modules to be installed under ~/.npm-global-pkg$NODE_PATH is used by Node when you require() a module; if the module isn't in the local project's directory it will try to import it from our new global directory.$PATH to add ~/.npm-global-pkg/bin, so when we install a global npm package that contains a command line program (like gulp, coffee, bower, etc.) it's available as a command in our shell.Then, create or edit the file ~/.npmrc to specify the same path from $NPM_PACKAGES as your npm prefix:
prefix = ${HOME}/.npm-global-pkg
This tells Node where to install packages when you run npm install -g.
Restart your terminal session or re-source your configuration so the environment variables take effect. Now, when you run a command like (the sudo-less!) npm install -g coffee-script, it will place its binary in ~/.npm-global-pkg/bin/coffee.
PSA: The "battery optimization" feature in Android 6.0 Marshmallow may be causing your Gmail to not notify you of e-mails until it's way too late and other apps to not notify you about anything ever.
I first caught on to this when I stumbled upon a Reddit thread on /r/Android. Essentially, Android 6.0 added a feature called Doze which puts apps to sleep while the phone is locked/not in use, giving them only brief windows of opportunity to check for any new notifications before being put back to sleep. The frequency between these wake opportunities depends on how long the phone has been locked. It sounds like a good idea in theory, but the execution was done very poorly.
That thread was specifically about apps like Gmail and Inbox. Users were seeing issues where Gmail wouldn't notify them about new e-mails until several hours after the e-mails came in. This is because the Gmail app was getting "dozed" and was unable to check for any new messages (or receive push notifications, or whatever it does). The work-around is to disable the "battery optimization" for the Gmail app.
To do so:
Doze makes it sound like not optimizing apps will hurt your battery life. This may be true for poorly written apps, but it's pretty safe to allow Gmail to not be put to sleep. Before Android 6.0, Doze wasn't even a feature anyway and there weren't a lot of complaints about battery life. Personally, I just disabled battery optimization for a small handful of apps that I care more about, including Gmail and Hangouts.
In addition to Gmail, a few other apps I found to be completely broken when they're being "optimized":
Google Opinion Rewards: Get Google Play credit for answering surveys. I noticed I wasn't getting any surveys offered for several weeks, and figured the Doze feature was to blame. I disabled it on the Google Opinion Rewards last night, and got a survey this morning.
My theory is that this app only receives surveys if there is one available at the time the app asks for it. Since the app was checking very infrequently, it was missing all the surveys.
Tasker: I have a Tasker task set up to automatically connect to my VPN when my phone joins certain WiFi networks. I was noticing that it was failing to do this the majority of the time. I'd have to open Tasker and manually play the Connect VPN task and then it would sorta work, but sometimes it would fail to run the Disconnect VPN task when I left the WiFi network.
Disabling battery optimization for Tasker fixed this problem.
Tumblr: I was getting no notifications at all from this app, ever. Disabling battery optimization fixed this problem.
Reddit Sync Pro: I was getting no notifications of new messages on this app until I manually opened it. Again, disabling the optimization helped.
So if you have any apps that have been oddly quiet for the past several weeks or months and you're running Android 6.0, check if the "battery optimization" feature is to blame.
The free SSL certificate authority Let's Encrypt went into public beta earlier this month, and I updated all of my sites to use SSL now. I still had several more months before kirsle.net's old certificate from Namecheap expired, but I switched to the Let's Encrypt certificate because I could include all my subdomains instead of only the www one.
Check out their website and get free SSL certificates for your sites, too. I'm just writing this blog with some personal tips for how I configured my nginx server and a Python script I wrote to automate the process of renewing my certificates every month (Let's Encrypt certs expire every 90 days).
This is something I wanted to rant about for a while: event loops in programming.
This post is specifically talking about programming languages that don't have their own built-in async model, and instead left it up to the community to create their own event loop modules instead. And how most of those modules don't get along well with the others.
Something pretty odd that's happened to me on more than a couple of occasions:
I'll wake up in the morning, and then a couple minutes later people start sending me messages on Google Hangouts, so my phone's making a bunch of noise. If it's early enough in the morning, some of those messages will even say things like, "you're up early."
The thing is though, I didn't even touch my phone yet. I didn't even look at my phone.
Messages like this don't tend to wake me up, but instead I don't start getting messages until just after I'm awake.
Over the last couple months I've been slowly working on rewriting RiveScript in yet another programming language: Google's Go language! It's also my first project in Go, which is what tends to be the case (rewriting RiveScript in Java and Python were my first projects in those languages, too).
But this is the last time I'm going to be rewriting RiveScript from scratch.
Last weekend I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Time Warner Cable already supports IPv6 at my apartment.
They shipped me a newer cable modem/WiFi router combo device earlier this year as part of their plan to upgrade everyone's Internet speeds in Los Angeles. I didn't realize that this modem also supported IPv6, and it wasn't enabled by default.
Today I picked up a Macbook Air (13", early 2015 model) because I wanted a new laptop, as my old laptop (the Samsung Series 5) has a horrible battery life, where it barely lasts over an hour and gives up early (powering down at 40% and not coming back up until I plug it in). This is also my first Apple computer. I'm the furthest thing from an Apple fanboy, but the choices I was throwing around in my head were between an Apple computer and a Lenovo Thinkpad.
I was given a Thinkpad as my work laptop, and it's by far the most impressive PC laptop I've ever used; it can drive three displays and run lots of concurrent tasks and has an insane battery life. Every PC laptop I've owned in the past have sucked in comparison. I hear people compare Apple computers to Thinkpads, so that's why the choice came down to one of these, and I didn't want another Thinkpad sitting around the house. ;)
Months before getting a Macbook I was looking into what kind of effort it takes to install Linux on a Macbook. There's a lot of information out there, and most of it suggests that the best way to go is to install a boot manager like rEFIt (or rEFInd, since rEFIt isn't maintained anymore). I saw some pages about not using rEFIt and installing Grub directly, which were from a Debian and Arch Linux perspective, and it sounded really complicated.
It seems that nowadays, with a user friendly Linux distribution like Fedora, a lot of this works much more flawlessly than the dozens of tutorials online would suggest. I just made a Fedora LiveUSB in the usual way (as if installing on a normal PC), rebooted the Macbook while holding the Option key, so that I was able to select the USB to boot from.
When installing Fedora to disk, the process was very much the same as doing it on a normal PC. I let Fedora automatically create the partition layout, and it created partitions and mount points for /, /boot and /home like usual, but it also created a partition and mount point for /boot/efi (for installing itself as the default bootloader in the EFI firmware on the Macbook). After installation was completed, I rebooted and the grub boot screen comes up immediately, with options to boot into Fedora.
One weird thing is, the grub screen apparently sees something related to Mac OS X (there were two entries, like "Mac OS X 32-bit" and "Mac OS X 64-bit", but both options would give error messages when picked).
If I want to boot into OS X, I hold down the Option key on boot and pick the Macintosh HD from the EFI boot menu. Otherwise, if the Macbook boots normally it goes into the grub menu and then Fedora. So, the whole thing is very similar to a typical PC dual-boot setup (with Windows and Linux), just with one extra step to get into OS X.
Update: I'm keeping a wiki page with miscellaneous setup notes and tips here: Fedora on Macbook
0.0023s.
