Just enough Git to use it by yourself

I was inspired to write this by a Cloudflare guide on how to use Hugo with Cloudflare Pages. The guide is generally just fine, but it explicitly assumes a “fundamental understanding” of Git without it being very clear what that means. They go on to provide example git commands that have an error, trying to push before the first commit. For a beginner with “fundamental understanding”, that sort of thing is pretty confusing....

2023-01-03 · James McDonald

Update expiry of GPG keys with separate master key

It’s nice and cosy and secure to have a separate GPG master key as described in many articles, for example https://wiki.debian.org/Subkeys. It’s also a good idea to set expiry dates on these keys so that if all else fails, at least they will only work for so long. But that means that every expiry interval you need to update the expiry dates to keep using the keys. And of course, like me, you totally remember how to do that a year (or a month, or 10 minutes) later....

2019-04-30 · James McDonald

Single node Kubernetes setup with kubeadm and cert-manager

These are essentially my notes on setting up a single-node Kubernetes cluster at home. Every time I set up an instance I have to dig through lots of posts, articles and documentation, much of it contradictory or out-of-date. Hopefully this distilled and much-abridged version will be helpful to someone else. This follows https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/independent/create-cluster-kubeadm/ for the initial cluster setup. You should look there for more detail. I strongly recommend that you read about the various projects and verify that this information is still valid....

2019-04-04 · James McDonald

First impressions of FOSDEM

It’s big. Really big. Just looking at the timetable is daunting, let alone choosing which talks to attend. People come to FOSDEM from everywhere. I don’t think I’ve ever heard such a wide selection of languages at the same place. It really brings home just how massive FOSS is, and how many people care about it. Venue I’ve never been to Brussels before. If there’s one regret about my FOSDEM trip, it’s that I didn’t have more time to spend in this beautiful city which appears to be full of fun, friendly people....

2019-02-04 · James McDonald

Passmenu pass frontend for macOS

I use pass for all my password-storage needs. It’s a simple shell wrapper around GPG and git and it works really nicely. On Linux, I use the passmenu dmenu script to quickly look up passwords and copy them to the clipboard, and I was very much missing that feature on my Mac. So being that sort, I learned some Swift and some Cocoa and made a little tool to do just that....

2018-09-14 · James McDonald