Sometimes you need to access a dev server running on localhost from another machine that is not part of the same network. Maybe you want to use your phone to test a web page, but are only in a guest WiFi. In the past, we often used some port forwarding or other techniques to expose the service to the internet.

Enter ngrok, a command line tool that gives you an on-the-fly internet...

Ubuntu has decided to disable PDF processing because ImageMagick and the underlying Ghostscript had several security issues.

When your Ghostscript is up to date (and receiving updates regularly), you can safely reactivate PDF processing on your computer like this:

1. Open /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml (requires sudo)
   • For older versions of Ubuntu (or possibly ImageMagick), the path is /etc/ImageMagick/policy.xml
2. Remove/Comment lines after <!-- disable ghostscript format types -->

If you need ...

I noticed that tig 2.5.1 that is provided by Ubuntu 22.04 repositories has inferior bash completion than older versions after a complete rewrite. Newer versions, however, received some fixes. This inspired me to upgrade tig.

The official debian repositories have more recent versions of tig than Ubuntu does.

• remove your current version of tig: sudo apt purge tig
• go to http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/t/tig/ and download the desired version for your machine (e.g. `tig_2.5.5-1_amd6...

Insomnia is a GUI tool to help you communicating with an API. There are also other tools to do this, e.g. Postman or the command line tool cURL.

While it is quite similar to Postman, I found the UI to be less cluttered and therefore easier to use.

The usage is almost self explanatory.

You can install it v...

If you are on a Linux shell and want to open a file with whatever default application is configured for that type, this often works:

xdg-open Quote.odt
xdg-open invoice.pdf
xdg-open index.html

Pro Tip

Make an alias so you have a simpler API (like Mac OS): alias open=xdg-open or alias x=xdg-open.

Background

You can choose your "Default applications" via UI in the Ubuntu "Settings" application (gnome-control-center). This is just a very rough setting (e.g. open Photos with Shotwell Viewer).

If a certain file...

Intro

Embedding videos on a website is very easy, add a <video> tag to your source code and it just works. Most of the time.

The thing is: Both the operating system and Browser of your client must support the container and codecs of your video. To ensure playback on every device, you have to transcode your videos to one or more versions of which they are supported by every device out there.

In this card, I'll explore the available audio and video standards we have right now. The goal is to built a pipeline that...

Basic configuration

Please keep this config simple. It should be a starting point for new developers learning Git.

[user]
  name = Your Name
  email = your.name@domain.com

[branch]
  sort = -committerdate
[color]
   ui = auto
[color "branch"]
  current = yellow reverse
  local = yellow
  remote = green
[color "diff"]
  whitespace = white reverse
  meta = blue reverse
  frag = blue reverse
  old = red
  new = green
[color "status"]
  added = green
  changed = yellow
  untracked = cyan
[interactive]
  singlekey = true # Do not requir...

Option 0: Download from the official page (preferred)

• Open https://googlechromelabs.github.io/chrome-for-testing/
• In Section "Stable" > chromedriver / linux64 > Download ZIP from URL
• Take the chromedriver binary from the ZIP file and put it e.g. into ~/bin.

Chromedriver must be available in your path. You can add ~/bin to your path like this:

echo "export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin" >> $HOME/.bash_profile

If you're also using Geordi, disable automatic updating of chromedriver in ~/.config/geordi/global.yml:

a...

Your development machine is usually on a very good network connection.
To test how your application behaves on a slow network (e.g. mobile), you can simulate limited bandwidth.

Chrome

• Open the dev tools (Ctrl+Shift+I or F12) and switch to the "Network" tab
• In the row below the dev tool tabs, there's a throttling dropdown which reads "Online" by default.
• Inside the dropdown, you will find a few presets and an option to add your own download/upload/latency settings.

Firefox

• Open the dev tools (Ctrl+Shift+I or F12) and switc...

On our Ubuntu machines we have nautilus file manager with nautilus-extension-gnome-terminal installed. This adds an entry to the context menu (right click) to start a gnome-terminal in the current directory. As I'm mostly using Terminator terminal, I wanted to have a similar context menu entry to launch Terminator directly. I came across this python script that does exactly that.

• Install python3-nautilus: sudo apt install python3-nautilus
• Create `/usr/share/nautilus-...

Tested on Ubunut 22.04

1. Opener script

• Create a file ~/.local/bin/coverage_zip_opener with:

#!/bin/bash

tmp_folder="/tmp/coverage-report-opener"

if [ -z "$1" ]
then
 echo "Usage: coverage_zip_opener [filename]"
 exit -1
fi

if ! [[ "$1" =~ ^.*Pipeline.*Coverage.*\.zip$ || "$1" =~ ^.*merged_coverage_report.*\.zip$ ]]; then
 file-roller "$1"
 exit 0
fi

rm -Rf $tmp_folder

unzip -qq "$1" -d $tmp_folder
index_filename=$(find /tmp/coverage-report-opener -name "index.html" | ...

Awesome is a very good tiling window manager that provides neat features like automatic layouting of windows, good multi-display support with per display workspaces and more. Since it is only a window manager, you will probably miss some of MATE's conveniences like the network manager, application menus, automatic updates etc.

Fortunately, you can run Awesome within MATE, by following these steps (tested on Ubuntu MATE 16.04):

Awesome + MATE

• Create the followi...

This article describes how to reset MySQL's or MariaDB's root password on your workstation. It's meant for local development purposes only, don't do this in production. This article will also help you if you have a fairly recent MariaDB version that uses authentication based on linux users instead of passwords for the root user and you prefer using a password for root.

Solution

Step 1 is getting a root mysql shell that allows us to change user credentials. We need to stop the mysql daemon first and re-start it without authorization c...

Ubuntu has a package mysql-sandbox that lets you install multiple MySQL versions into your user home:

1. Install mysql-sandbox

sudo apt install mysql-sandbox

2. Download the version of MySQL you want to use from mysql.com:
   https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/file/?id=480427
   Make sure to choose "Generic Linux" instead of "Ubuntu" so you get a .tar.gz instead of .deb

3. cd into the directory the mysql binaries will be extracted to

mkdir -p ~/bin/sandbox_dist
cd ~/bin/sandbox_dist

4. Build the sandbox

make_sandbo...

Im using the terminator terminal with the keyboard shortcut Control+Shift+E for splitting the terminal. I got used to this shortcut.

Yesterday the Ubuntu update seems to have upgraded ibus, which got this emoji picker that also uses Control+Shift+E to open.
You can change this behaviour by opening the ibus setup from the console:

ibus-setup

A window will open and you can delete the shortcut in the emoji tab (Emoj...

Ubuntu comes with keyboard layouts like "Germany Eliminate Dead Keys", which are practical for programming.

If you need to type accented characters with such a layout, make sure to configure a Compose key. You can then look up which compose combo will produce the character you need.

E.g. you can type "á" by pressing Compose, ´, a.

If you need to convert an SVG source to PS or EPS, the most common suggestion on the interwebs is to use Inkscape from the commandline.
Inkscape is a fairly resource-heavy tool with lots of dependencies. A great alternative for converting is CairoSVG.

CairoSVG is available on most Linux distros through their package management systems, e.g. apt install cairosvg on Ubuntu.
It has few dependencies (most importantly Python 3 and some related packages, but really not much)...

These are the results of the "personal tech stack survey". I've included only the most popular mentions, maybe it can help you find one or two useful tools for your own usage.

Desktop environment

pie title Desktop environment
    "Gnome" : 16
    "i3": 2
    "sway": 2
    "awesome": 1
    "bspwm": 1
    "mate": 1
    "xfce": 1

Gnome dominates (unsuprising, it's the Ubuntu default), but quite a few people use tiling window managers, most popular i3 and the mostly i3-compatible [sway](https://swaywm....

It seems like changing the HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE is not possible for a headless chrome.

• On Ubuntu the headless Chrome derives the Accept-Language from the operation system
• Adding the option options.add_argument('--lang=de') to the Capybara::Selenium::Driver has no effect
• Adding the preference options.add_preference('intl.accept_languages', 'de') to the Capybara::Selenium::Driver has only effects if the --headless option is skipped (see bug ticket #775911)
• Cha...

Because colors improve readability so much.
On Ubuntu 18.04 you can install it with sudo apt install grc

From github:

For the impatient - try following commands:

grc netstat
grc ping hostname
grc tail /var/log/syslog
grc ps aux

Copy and paste at will, they're free!

• German quotation marks: „ “ (Ubuntu-Hotkey: AltGr+v and AltGr+b)
• English quotation marks: “ ”
• En dash: –
• Em dash: —
• Ellipsis: …

Some useful hints for users of Ubuntu Linux

• Your Ubuntu comes with a searchable list of Unicode chars. Go to Accessories / Character map. Ctrl + F searches for a character by name.
• If you want to write all of them (and more) yourself, [configure a compose key](https://makandracards.com/makandra/1030-insert-an...

We use foreman to start all necessary processes for an application, which are declared in a Procfile. This is very convenient, but the outputs of all processes get merged together. Especially while debugging you might not want other processes to flood your screen with their log messages.

The following setup allows you to start Terminator in a split view with the Rails server running in the left pane and all remaining processes running via foreman in the right pane. It was heavily inspired by [this card](https://makandracards.com/makandr...

This should be fixed in the latest LTS-branches of our mysql2 fork, 0.2.x-lts and 0.3.x-lts.

Use

gem 'mysql2', git: 'https://github.com/makandra/mysql2', branch: '0.2.x-lts' # for Rails 2.x
gem 'mysql2', git: 'https://github.com/makandra/mysql2', branch: '0.3.x-lts' # for Rails 3.x

in your Gemfile, and do a

bundle update mysql2

Background

mysql2 used to check that the client library used at runtime actually matches the one it was compiled against. However, at least on Ubunt...

There is a new card about how to do this with the new AWS Command Line Interface

At first you need the IAM Cli Tools.
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