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Bringing dwm Shortcuts to GNOME 2023-11-02 The dwm window manager is my standard "go-to" for most of my personal laptop environments. For desktops with larger, higher resolution monitors I tend to lean towards using GNOME. The GNOME DE is fairly solid for my own purposes. This article isn't going to deep dive into GNOME itself, but instead highlight some minor configuration changes I make to mimic a few dwm shortcuts. For reference, I'm running GNOME 45.0 on Ubuntu 23.10 Setting Up Fixed Workspaces When I use dwm I tend to have a hard-set amount of tags to cycle through (normally 4-5). Unfortunately, dynamic rendering is the default for workspaces (ie. tags) in GNOME. For my personal preference I set this setting to fixed. We can achieve this by opening Settings > Multitasking and selecting "Fixed number of workspaces". Screenshot of GNOME's Multitasking Settings GUI Setting Our Keybindings Now all that is left is to mimic dwm keyboard shortcuts, in this case: ALT + $num for switching between workspaces and ALT + SHIFT + $num for moving windows across workspaces. These keyboard shortcuts can be altered under Settings > Keyboard > View and Customize Shortcuts > Navigation. You'll want to make edits to both the "Switch to workspace n" and "Move window to workspace n". Screenshot of GNOME's keyboard shortcut GUI: switch to workspace Screenshot of GNOME's keyboard shortcut GUI: move window to workspace That's it. You're free to include even more custom keyboard shortcuts (open web browser, lock screen, hibernate, etc.) but this is a solid starting point. Enjoy tweaking GNOME!
The X220 ThinkPad is the Best Laptop in the World 2023-09-26 The X220 ThinkPad is the greatest laptop ever made and you're wrong if you think otherwise. No laptop hardware has since surpassed the nearly perfect build of the X220. New devices continue to get thinner and more fragile. Useful ports are constantly discarded for the sake of "design". Functionality is no longer important to manufacturers. Repairability is purposefully removed to prevent users from truly "owing" their hardware. It's a mess out there. But thank goodness I still have my older, second-hand X220. Specs Before I get into the details explaining why this laptop is the very best of its kind, let's first take a look at my machine's basic specifications: CPU: Intel i7-2640M (4) @ 3.500GHz GPU: Intel 2nd Generation Core Processor Memory: 16GB DDR3 OS: Arch Linux / OpenBSD Resolution: 1366x768 With that out of the way, I will break down my thoughts on the X220 into five major sections: Build quality, available ports, the keyboard, battery life, and repairability. Build Quality The X220 (like most of Lenovo's older X/T models) is built like a tank. Although sourced from mostly plastic, the device is still better equipped to handle drops and mishandling compared to that of more fragile devices (such as the MacBook Air or Framework). This is made further impressive since the X220 is actually composed of many smaller interconnected pieces (more on this later). A good litmus test I perform on most laptops is the "corner test". You grab the base corner of a laptop in its open state. The goal is to see if the device displays any noticeable give or flex. In the X220's case: it feels rock solid. The base remains stiff and bobbing the device causes no movement on the opened screen. I'm aware that holding a laptop in this position is certainly not a normal use case, but knowing it is built well enough to do so speaks volumes of its construction. The X220 is also not a lightweight laptop. This might be viewed as a negative for most users, but I actually prefer it. I often become too cautious and end up "babying" thinner laptops out of fear of breakage. A minor drop from even the smallest height will severely damage these lighter devices. I have no such worries with my X220. As for the laptop's screen and resolution: your mileage may vary. I have zero issues with the default display or the smaller aspect ratio. I wrote about how I stopped using an external monitor, so I might be a little biased. Overall, this laptop is a device you can snatch up off your desk, whip into your travel bag and be on your way. The rugged design and bulkier weight help put my mind at ease - which is something I can't say for newer laptop builds. Ports Ports. Ports Everywhere. I don't think I need to explain how valuable it is to have functional ports on a laptop. Needing to carrying around a bunch of dongles for ports that should already be on the device just seems silly. The X220 comes equipped with: 3 USB ports (one of those being USB3 on the i7 model) DisplayPort VGA Ethernet SD Card Reader 3.5mm Jack Ultrabay (SATA) Wi-Fi hardware kill-switch Incredibly versatile and ready for anything I throw at it! Keyboard The classic ThinkPad keyboards are simply that: classic. I don't think anyone could argue against these keyboards being the golden standard for laptops. It's commendable how Lenovo managed to package so much functionality into such a small amount of real estate. Most modern laptops lack helpful keys such as Print Screen, Home, End, and Screen Lock. They're also an absolute joy to type on. The fact that so many people go out of their way to mod X230 ThinkPad models with X220 keyboards should tell you something... Why Lenovo moved away from these keyboards will always baffle me. (I know why they did it - I just think it's stupid). Did I mention these classic keyboards come with the extremely useful Trackpoint as well? Battery Life Author's Note: This section is very subjective. The age, quality, and size of the X220's battery can have a massive impact on benchmarks. I should also mention that I run very lightweight operating systems and use DWM as opposed to a heavier desktop environment. Just something to keep in mind. The battery life on my own X220 is fantastic. I have a brand-new 9-cell that lasts for roughly 5-6 hours of daily work. Obviously these numbers don't come close to the incredible battery life of Apple's M1/M2 chip devices, but it's still quite competitive against other "newer" laptops on the market. Although, even if the uptime was lower than 5-6 hours, you have the ability to carry extra batteries with you. The beauty of swapping out your laptop's battery without needing to open up the device itself is fantastic. Others might whine about the annoyance of carrying an extra battery in their travel bag, but doing so is completely optional. A core part of what makes the X220 so wonderful is user control and choice. The X220's battery is another great example of that. Repairability The ability to completely disassemble and replace almost everything on the X220 has to be one of its biggest advantages over newer laptops. No glue to rip apart. No special proprietary tools required. Just some screws and plastic snaps. If someone as monkey-brained as me can completely strip down this laptop and put it back together again without issue, then the hardware designers have done something right! Best of all, Lenovo provides a very detailed hardware maintenance manual to help guide you through the entire process. My disassembled X220 when I was reapplying the CPU thermal paste. Bonus Round: Price I didn't list this in my initial section "breakdown" but it's something to consider. I purchased my X220 off eBay for $175 Canadian. While this machine came with a HDD instead of an SSD and only 8GB of total memory, that was still an incredible deal. I simply swapped out the hard-drive with an SSD I had on hand, along with upgrading the DDR3 memory to its max of 16. Even if you needed to buy those components separately you would be hard-pressed to find such a good deal for a decent machine. Not to mention you would be helping to prevent more e-waste! What More Can I Say? Obviously the title and tone of this article is all in good fun. Try not to take things so seriously! But, I still personally believe the X220 is one of, if not the best laptop in the world.
Installing Older Versions of MongoDB on Arch Linux 2023-09-11 I've recently been using Arch Linux for my main work environment on my ThinkPad X260. It's been great. As someone who is constantly drawn to minimalist operating systems such as Alpine or OpenBSD, it's nice to use something like Arch that boasts that same minimalist approach but with greater documentation/support. Another major reason for the switch was the need to run older versions of "services" locally. Most people would simply suggest using Docker or vmm, but I personally run projects in self-contained, personalized directories on my system itself. I am aware of the irony in that statement... but that's just my personal preference. So I thought I would share my process of setting up an older version of MongoDB (3.4 to be precise) on Arch Linux. AUR to the Rescue You will need to target the specific version of MongoDB using the very awesome AUR packages: yay -S mongodb34-bin Follow the instructions and you'll be good to go. Don't forget to create the /data/db directory and give it proper permissions: mkdir -p /data/db/ chmod -R 777 /date/db What About My "Tools"? If you plan to use MongoDB, then you most likely want to utilize the core database tools (restore, dump, etc). The problem is you can't use the default mongodb-tools package when trying to work with older versions of MongoDB itself. The package will complain about conflicts and ask you to override your existing version. This is not what we want. So, you'll have to build from source locally: git clone https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-tools cd mongodb-tools ./make build Then you'll need to copy the built executables into the proper directory in order to use them from the terminal: cp bin/* /usr/local/bin/ And that's it! Now you can run mongod directly or use systemctl to enable it by default. Hopefully this helps anyone else curious about running older (or even outdated!) versions of MongoDB.
Converting HEIF Images with macOS Automator 2023-07-21 Often times when you save or export photos from iOS to iCloud they often render themselves into heif or heic formats. Both macOS and iOS have no problem working with these formats, but a lot of software programs will not even recognize these filetypes. The obvious step would just be to convert them via an application or online service, right? Not so fast! Wouldn't it be much cleaner if we could simply right-click our heif or heic files and convert them directly in Finder? Well, I've got some good news for you... Basic Requirements You will need to have Homebrew installed You will need to install the libheif package through Homebrew: brew install libheif Creating our custom Automator script For this example script we are going to convert the image to JPG format. You can freely change this to whatever format you wish (PNG, TIFF, etc.). We're just keeping things basic for this tutorial. Don't worry if you've never worked with Automator before because setting things up is incredibly simple. Open the macOS Automator from the Applications folder Select Quick Option from the first prompt Set "Workflow receives current" to image files Set the label "in" to Finder From the left pane, select "Library > Utilities" From the presented choices in the next pane, drag and drop Run Shell Script into the far right pane Set the area "Pass input" to as arguments Enter the following code below as your script and type ⌘-S to save (name it something like "Convert HEIC/HEIF to JPG") for f in "$@" do /opt/homebrew/bin/heif-convert "$f" "${f%.*}.jpg" done Making Edits If you ever have the need to edit this script (for example, changing the default format to png), you will need to navigate to your ~/Library/Services folder and open your custom heif Quick Action in the Automator application. Simple as that. Happy converting! If you're interested, I also have some other Automator scripts available: Batch Converting Images to webp with macOS Automator Convert Files to HTML with macOS Automator Quick Actions
Blogging for 7 Years 2023-06-24 My first public article was posted on June 28th 2016. That was seven years ago. In that time, quite a lot has changed in my life both personally and professionally. So, I figured it would be interesting to reflect on these years and document it for my own personal records. My hope is that this is something I could start doing every 5 or 10 years (if I can keep going that long!). This way, my blog also serves as a "time capsule" or museum of the past... Fun Facts This Blog: I originally started blogging on bradleytaunt.com using WordPress, but since then I have changed both my main domain and blog infrastructure multiple times. At a glance I have used: Jekyll Hugo Blot Static HTML/CSS PHPetite Shinobi pblog barf Currently using! Personal: As with anyone over time, the personal side of my life has seen the biggest updates: Married the love of my life (after knowing each other for ~14 years!) Moved out into rural Ontario for some peace and quiet Had three wonderful kids with said wife (two boys and a girl) Started noticing grey sprinkles in my stubble (I guess I can officially call myself a "grey beard"?) Professionally: Pivoted heavily into UX research and design for a handful of years (after working mostly with web front-ends) Recently switched back into a more fullstack development role to challenge myself and learn more Nothing Special This post isn't anything ground-breaking but for me it's nice to reflect on the time passed and remember how much can change in such little time. Hopefully I'll be right back here in another 7 years and maybe you'll still be reading along with me!
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I’ve long been interested in new and different platforms. I ran Debian on an Alpha back in the late 1990s and was part of the Alpha port team; then I helped bootstrap Debian on amd64. I’ve got somewhere around 8 Raspberry Pi devices in active use right now, and the free NNCPNET Internet email service … Continue reading ARM is great, ARM is terrible (and so is RISC-V) →
In my first interview out of college I was asked the change counter problem: Given a set of coin denominations, find the minimum number of coins required to make change for a given number. IE for USA coinage and 37 cents, the minimum number is four (quarter, dime, 2 pennies). I implemented the simple greedy algorithm and immediately fell into the trap of the question: the greedy algorithm only works for "well-behaved" denominations. If the coin values were [10, 9, 1], then making 37 cents would take 10 coins in the greedy algorithm but only 4 coins optimally (10+9+9+9). The "smart" answer is to use a dynamic programming algorithm, which I didn't know how to do. So I failed the interview. But you only need dynamic programming if you're writing your own algorithm. It's really easy if you throw it into a constraint solver like MiniZinc and call it a day. int: total; array[int] of int: values = [10, 9, 1]; array[index_set(values)] of var 0..: coins; constraint sum (c in index_set(coins)) (coins[c] * values[c]) == total; solve minimize sum(coins); You can try this online here. It'll give you a prompt to put in total and then give you successively-better solutions: coins = [0, 0, 37]; ---------- coins = [0, 1, 28]; ---------- coins = [0, 2, 19]; ---------- coins = [0, 3, 10]; ---------- coins = [0, 4, 1]; ---------- coins = [1, 3, 0]; ---------- Lots of similar interview questions are this kind of mathematical optimization problem, where we have to find the maximum or minimum of a function corresponding to constraints. They're hard in programming languages because programming languages are too low-level. They are also exactly the problems that constraint solvers were designed to solve. Hard leetcode problems are easy constraint problems.1 Here I'm using MiniZinc, but you could just as easily use Z3 or OR-Tools or whatever your favorite generalized solver is. More examples This was a question in a different interview (which I thankfully passed): Given a list of stock prices through the day, find maximum profit you can get by buying one stock and selling one stock later. It's easy to do in O(n^2) time, or if you are clever, you can do it in O(n). Or you could be not clever at all and just write it as a constraint problem: array[int] of int: prices = [3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8]; var int: buy; var int: sell; var int: profit = prices[sell] - prices[buy]; constraint sell > buy; constraint profit > 0; solve maximize profit; Reminder, link to trying it online here. While working at that job, one interview question we tested out was: Given a list, determine if three numbers in that list can be added or subtracted to give 0? This is a satisfaction problem, not a constraint problem: we don't need the "best answer", any answer will do. We eventually decided against it for being too tricky for the engineers we were targeting. But it's not tricky in a solver; include "globals.mzn"; array[int] of int: numbers = [3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8]; array[index_set(numbers)] of var {0, -1, 1}: choices; constraint sum(n in index_set(numbers)) (numbers[n] * choices[n]) = 0; constraint count(choices, -1) + count(choices, 1) = 3; solve satisfy; Okay, one last one, a problem I saw last year at Chipy AlgoSIG. Basically they pick some leetcode problems and we all do them. I failed to solve this one: Given an array of integers heights representing the histogram's bar height where the width of each bar is 1, return the area of the largest rectangle in the histogram. The "proper" solution is a tricky thing involving tracking lots of bookkeeping states, which you can completely bypass by expressing it as constraints: array[int] of int: numbers = [2,1,5,6,2,3]; var 1..length(numbers): x; var 1..length(numbers): dx; var 1..: y; constraint x + dx <= length(numbers); constraint forall (i in x..(x+dx)) (y <= numbers[i]); var int: area = (dx+1)*y; solve maximize area; output ["(\(x)->\(x+dx))*\(y) = \(area)"] There's even a way to automatically visualize the solution (using vis_geost_2d), but I didn't feel like figuring it out in time for the newsletter. Is this better? Now if I actually brought these questions to an interview the interviewee could ruin my day by asking "what's the runtime complexity?" Constraint solvers runtimes are unpredictable and almost always than an ideal bespoke algorithm because they are more expressive, in what I refer to as the capability/tractability tradeoff. But even so, they'll do way better than a bad bespoke algorithm, and I'm not experienced enough in handwriting algorithms to consistently beat a solver. The real advantage of solvers, though, is how well they handle new constraints. Take the stock picking problem above. I can write an O(n²) algorithm in a few minutes and the O(n) algorithm if you give me some time to think. Now change the problem to Maximize the profit by buying and selling up to max_sales stocks, but you can only buy or sell one stock at a given time and you can only hold up to max_hold stocks at a time? That's a way harder problem to write even an inefficient algorithm for! While the constraint problem is only a tiny bit more complicated: include "globals.mzn"; int: max_sales = 3; int: max_hold = 2; array[int] of int: prices = [3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8]; array [1..max_sales] of var int: buy; array [1..max_sales] of var int: sell; array [index_set(prices)] of var 0..max_hold: stocks_held; var int: profit = sum(s in 1..max_sales) (prices[sell[s]] - prices[buy[s]]); constraint forall (s in 1..max_sales) (sell[s] > buy[s]); constraint profit > 0; constraint forall(i in index_set(prices)) (stocks_held[i] = (count(s in 1..max_sales) (buy[s] <= i) - count(s in 1..max_sales) (sell[s] <= i))); constraint alldifferent(buy ++ sell); solve maximize profit; output ["buy at \(buy)\n", "sell at \(sell)\n", "for \(profit)"]; Most constraint solving examples online are puzzles, like Sudoku or "SEND + MORE = MONEY". Solving leetcode problems would be a more interesting demonstration. And you get more interesting opportunities to teach optimizations, like symmetry breaking. Because my dad will email me if I don't explain this: "leetcode" is slang for "tricky algorithmic interview questions that have little-to-no relevance in the actual job you're interviewing for." It's from leetcode.com. ↩
I’m something of a filesystem geek, I guess. I first wrote about ZFS on Linux 14 years ago, and even before I used ZFS, I had used ext2/3/4, jfs, reiserfs, xfs, and no doubt some others. I’ve also used btrfs. I last posted about it in 2014, when I noted it has some advantages over … Continue reading btrfs on a Raspberry Pi →
Something like a channel changer, for the web. That's what the idea was at first. But it led to a whole new path of discovery that even the site's creators couldn't have predicted. The post Stumbling upon appeared first on The History of the Web.
