I’ve decided to give Wakatime a second try. It’s a tool that tracks the time you spend programming on different projects by integrating into your IDE. This works well for typical development work where you open your IDE in the morning and type code in it, do commits with it, and everything else related to the project and Wakatime will track that.
I don’t work like that though, so I had two issues with it last time, both resulting in a lower reported time spent working:
I spent most of the day working on different remote servers and it would be a hassle to set it up in the text editor on each of them and it would undoubtedly cause slowdown on the older servers
I use the command line tools as my IDE, so the time recorded opening the text editor to make some changes is not representative of the time spent working
This time it’s different because nowadays I virtualise most of the services I work with, using Docker on my local machine, and I’m hoping that using the Wakatime Z Shell integration will give a better record of time spent working on a project. Continue reading →
The Hungarian coat of arms features an iconic cross with two horizontal beams. In Hungarian it’s called “Kettős Kereszt” which translates to “Double Cross”, usually called the Patriarchal cross in English. This cross is present on other emblems around the area of Central and Eastern Europe too and has been featured on the Hungarian coat of arms at least since the reign of King Saint Stephen of Hungary.
3D model of the patriarchal cross as shown on the Hungarian coat of arms
Seeing as it’s a Hungarian national holiday today, in memory of the heroes and martyrs of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, everyone has their Hungarian flags out. I decided to do something Hungarian too, while trying out some tools for preparing models for 3D printing. So far I’ve been using Blender, because I have some experience with it, but it’s for creating 3D scenes and although you can use it to design 3D models for printing, it’s not CAD software. This time I tried Autodesk’s web-based program Tinkercad, which although lacking many of the features you’d get in a full-blown CAD program, is plenty enough for me to design simple things like this. Not being a mechanical engineer, I probably wouldn’t even know what features I’m missing!
3D printed “Kettős Kereszt” painted in the colours of the Hungarian flag
The program is very intuitive to use. I put a few cubes on the workplane, stretched them out into intersecting rectangular boxes and exported an STL file for printing within minutes. You can see a screenshot of the result above. I also made a version with a hole cut out of the top so you could hang it on a key chain. That turned out to be as easy as putting a cylinder in one of the boxes, stretching it out of the top and bottom box faces and marking it as a “hole” in the model.
After scaling the model down to 30% so it fits on my print bed, the final print came out as shown in this photo. It took less than 10 minutes to print at 30% in-fill and seems pretty rigid. I’ve painted on the red, white and green of the Hungarian flag and will hang this up somewhere, who knows, maybe it’ll even be good for a Christmas decoration. If you’d like to print your own Hungarian cross you can download both of my STL files here:
My wife’s phone (Samsung Galaxy Mini GT-S5570I) doesn’t get system updates any more, so I need to manually move Google’s updates into ROM to make space for regular apps. You need root privileges to do this, so I was following these instructions on the XDA Forum which almost work fine. You need to download and apply a file update.zip but the problem is the update script inside doesn’t include S5570I in the list of phone models it checks for, so the script aborts.
All you need to do is edit /META-INF/com/google/android/updater-script inside update.zip and include this phone model in the assertion list, for example, I duplicated lines 15 and 16 and just added an I to the end:
Everything works completely fine after that. Obviously this is not a general solution when rooting, you can’t just blindly add your own phone model into any update.zip not knowing what’s in it, but since this was from a post for specifically this model and it already had several very similar models listed, I thought it was worth the risk and it turned out just fine. Woop! 😎
The sparkup plugin for vim lets you write HTML markup faster by Zen Coding, in which you write short code, resembling CSS selectors, which is then expanded to HTML by the editor. For example, writing
A tip for any Debian user trying to get PGP to work in Icedove, Debian’s re-branded version of the Thunderbird Mail client: All the tutorials and forums on the internet telling you to install Enigmail from Thunderbird’s Add-on menu won’t work. It’s not there. Enigmail isn’t compatible with your version of Thunderbird, which is… Icedove. The solution is simple but not obvious; Enigmail needs to be installed from the package manager, a simple
