Pragmatism in the real world
The most common use of JWTs is as an authentication token, usually within an OAuth2 workflow. Creating these tokens is part and parcel of the authentication library that you use. I recently had a requirement to use a JWT independent of authentication and these are some notes on what I learned when researching with Lcobucci\JWT. Make up of a JWT To really understand JWTs, read RFC7519. For a more readable introduction, read the one on… continue reading.
One annoyance I had with my external USB hard drives is that they weren't sleeping when idle which makes them noisy. We can't have that! My first port of call was hdparm and its -S parameter: sudo hdparm -S 60 /dev/sdb However this didn't help. Fortunately, I found hd-idle which worked! After installing, you need to edit /etc/default/hd-idle and change the HD_IDLE_OPTS setting from -h to whatever you need. For me, I have set: HD_IDLE_OPTS="-i… continue reading.
I recently added a second SSD to my Linux server and had to look up how to format it and set it up, having not taken notes for the first one. These are the notes I took the second time. This is all done from the command line and the monospace text is to be typed directly – though change the identifiers if requried. sudo lshw -C disk to confirm disk is seen by the… continue reading.
Shortly after building a script to create binaries for Rodeo, my command line Flickr uploader, I realised that I could use a Github Actions workflow to run it and attach the created binaries to the Release page once I had created it. This is what I did. Trigger on release A GitHub Actions workflow is a YAML file and each workflow has to be triggered. For Continuous Integration, it's common to trigger when new PR… continue reading.
Last week, I attended PHPUK 2024. This is one of the major PHP conferences and I was pleased to speak about DDD there. Sam and the team did a fantastic job this year with the videos already published. To my mind, attending a conference provides a number of benefits. The first and most obvious one is that you learn some amazing things, from people who tend to know what they are talking about. At PHPUK… continue reading.
One nice thing about Go is that it can cross-compile which allows me to use my Mac to build binaries for different operating systems. This is increibly useful for providing binaries for Rodeo, my command line Flickr uploader. To do this we set the GOOS and GOARCH environment variables before calling go build. For example to build for x64 on Linux, I do: version=`git describe –tags HEAD` env GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build \ -ldflags "-X… continue reading.
When I was building Rodeo, my command line Flickr uploader, one thing I wanted to do was set the version number that you see when you type rodeo -v to the correct version when I build the application for release. The basic process I wanted was: Tag git repository with new version number and push Build rodeo with that version without editing any files Upload binary I've emphasised the important part. I don't want to… continue reading.
I have a Linux-based server that acts as my Plex server amongst other things. It's fanless and I added an additional SSD for to hold the media data so it is nice and quiet. I'm a little bit of a belt-and-braces person when it comes to backing up my data, so in addition to backing up to the cloud, I also back up the data from the SSD to an external HDD every night using… continue reading.
I upload lots of pictures to Flickr and sometimes I just want to point at a file in Finder and upload it. Fairly recently, macOS introduced Quick Actions to Finder and this seemed like the ideal way to have a quick and easy way to upload an image to Flickr. To do this, the easiest way is to use Automator and call through to my Rodeo command line tool to do the actual upload. Start… continue reading.
I regularly need to darken images for background use behind a title. I've been using a filter in Acorn, but finally decided to make it a script that uses ImageMagick so that I could simplify it all with Alfred. This is the script: darken-image.sh #!/usr/bin/env bash if [ -z "$1" ] then echo "Usage: darken-image [contrast=40]" echo "" exit 1 fi in_filename="$1" amount=${2:-40} # Set output filename to original filename with "-darker" appended extension="${in_filename##*.}" name="${in_filename%.*}"… continue reading.
