Always prefer accessing GitHub over SSH than HTTPS

This is to avoid accidentally cloning a repo as read-only when GitHub defaults to HTTPS links, and then having to edit the gitconfig later to get an SSH URL you can push to. Add these 2 lines to your global .gitconfig file in your home folder to override all github.com URLs from HTTPS to SSH:

[url "ssh://git@github.com/"]
     insteadOf = https://github.com/

Why though?

Note, this is not for all git remotes, only GitHub. I have a similar setting for the GitHub Enterprise instance we use at work. Generally though, for most remote servers I’m fine with whatever it gives me, which is usually HTTPS.

The difference becomes important if I ever want to contribute (i.e. push) to the cloned repo, as is mostly the case when cloning my own repos or work code. Continue reading

Launched a new game: Cr1ckt

Direct link to game: https://sinisterstuf.itch.io/cr1ckt

On the 1st of December Tristan, Rowan and I released the first version of Cr1ckt, a tricky platformer where you need to jump to avoid water and get to the fruit. It’s our submission for the GitHub Game Off 2021 game jam, an annual challenge to make a game based on a secret theme within the month of November. The theme this year is “BUG” so apart from playing as a cricket it also has some fun, intentional bugs.

It’s got downloads for major desktop platforms Windows, Linux & Mac, as well as Android. They’re quite small so you should be able to download and play quite fast. You can get the downloads or play online in your browser on the game page at sinisterstuf.itch.io/cr1ckt.

As hobbyist game developers in our free time this is one of the Continue reading

First time in Hacktoberfest

This year was my first time participating in the online Hacktoberfest event.

I often use code from GitHub and occasionally publish my own projects there but I realised I rarely contribute to other people’s code. Hearing people talking about the event on the Ladybug Podcast, I was inspired to make a small pull request. The boost I got from something so insignificant being merged lead me to look through my favourite projects’ issue lists to see if there was a bug I could fix or a missing feature I could implement.

Continue reading

Fixing a typo across multiple repos

Yesterday I found a typo in a pull request description while browsing another team’s project which I stumbled upon. I mentioned it to the author but it turned out that that part of the text came from the repository’s pull request template, which means every pull request will have this amusing but irritating mistake. I sent them a pull request, modifying the template, to fix the mistake at the source and avoid it in future, and thought that would be the end of it.

It turns out that template was written once and then copied across to new repos, which means this typo actually exists in almost all the pull requests in all of that team’s projects. Well that escalated quickly. This is the point where the average person probably says “OK whatever, it’s not worth it for something so small, there are too many repos, it’s just a small typo, never mind” and stop. A very determined person might actually start opening browser tabs and psyching themselves up to do pull requests. I open my terminal emulator and start writing a for loop. Continue reading

Packaged Tomboy add-ins for Arch Linux

The wiki-like note taking application, Tomboy, maintains a list of user-written add-ins on its website, almost none of which were available in the Arch Linux repositories. Recently I learnt how packages are created for Arch Linux and read up on the standards, so I ‘adopted’ an ownerless add-in package from the Arch Linux User Repository and packaged 6 more.

Finally, I created a meta-package called tomboy-extras which contains nothing but depends on all the working Tomboy add-ins (tested on my laptop) in the AUR, to easily install all add-ins at once. I created a gist on GitHub for each package’s build script and made a repository containing the meta-package’s PKGBUILD file and each gist as a git sub-module named after the package name. The README file in tomboy-extras’ git repository contains links to the gists for the add-ins’ PKGBUILDs so that they can be found easily.

So, if you would like to contribute to one of them, feel free to fork the relevant gist, or leave a comment there, and if you would like to contribute to tomboy-extras itself or have an add-in included, just fork tomboy-extras and send a pull request; I’ll probably be adding more add-ins to it myself already. Also, if you do use any of these packages, please give them a vote on AUR so that we can see how many people use them. If they’re popular, they may be included in the official repositories, who knows!