macOS comes with some powerful tools out of the box. Press Shift+Cmd+5 and you’re ready to record the screen, with or without audio. That is neat. Once you’re done a recording is stored on your Desktop, and you’re free to share it with friends and family. Unless.. Read more

Working with JSON in Go can be tricky. Specially if you’re coming from dynamic languages like Python or JavaScript, where JSON encoding often “just works”. Over the years I had grown accustomed to those conveniences and that made me overlook many details which affect JSON encoding in Go. This guide hopefully helps me to avoid those mistakes in the future. Read more

Update: It’s official, Mercurial is dead. The last hg stronghold has fallen: We’ve decided to remove Mercurial support from Bitbucket Cloud and the API. Mercurial usage on Bitbucket is steadily declining, and the percentage of new Bitbucket users choosing Mercurial has fallen to less than 1%. – Atlassian Happy aliasing! Original post from 2018-07-31 I recently went through some Mercurial to Git migrations. While stack overflow pretty much always has something to tell you, it never goes so smoothly in real life. Here’s my step-by-step guide including some random errors that you are bound to encounter. Read more

Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts - My notes, selected quotes and references for Annie Duke’s book.

There is a simple task that I occasionally need to perform which has caused me many headaches during the past 10 years: send an email from a server. I remember a day in my early career where I spent hours and hours trying to get Exim4 configured. I’ve similar recollections with Postfix, Sendmail and ssmtp. The last being close to what I was initially hoping for to find. But even this had it’s issues. Read more

I just spent two hours of my life trying to get AssumeRole working. And that was not the first time. So I hope this article saves someone elses time or reminds me again in six months how to do this properly. Read more

On my day job I use Chrome as my default browser and at home I roll with Safari. Occasionally I want to get work stuff done at home as well, with my personal laptop. Chrome profile sync works well for bookmarks, plugins and preferences, but opening links from email and chats in Safari while I’m in “work mode” is a bit annoying. Navigation to Chrome preferences to set it as the default, and later to remember to set Safari back seems a bit daft. Read more

Edit3, 2018: Just use ffmpeg. Re-encode is usually not what you are after, specially if the source itself is already a low qualtiy MP3 file. Read more

Once in a while I encounter a video file which has more than one audio stream attached to it. Usually I’m only interested in one of those and want to get rid of the others. Specially if the first one is not the one I’m interested in. Xbox for example does provide an easy way to selecting some other stream besides the first one. The wonderful open-source project libav provides the tools we need: avprobe and avconv. Read more

By the end of this year Sony has launched their new PlayStation 4 and Microsoft their new Xbox One. I’ve always been a Xbox user and haven’t ever really understood PS’s strange controller and ugly user interface, but the new generation console war seems already to be won by Sony. Microsoft keeps shooting itself in the foot. They desperately try to innovate, but it just won’t work. Instead of acknowledging the problem, they lie to themselves and keep on trying. Read more