I started writing before the generative AI became popular. Even a simple article always took me a lot of time to write. Nowadays, authors can produce¹ and publish high-quality content faster than ever before, with almost zero effort. On the other hand, consumers no longer have to search and browse the Internet for the answers – they can generate curated content on almost any topic just for themselves.

If any answer can be instantly generated by an LLM, what’s the point of writing?

In my home, I have a mechanical ventilation system with heat recovery powered by Stiebel Eltron V-400. Basically, it’s a large fan with air inflows and outflows ducts. Besides some built-in automation, it’s a pretty dumb device. Without a dedicated gateway (which costs extra money), I can only control it or see its current parameters on the controller, either on the unit or in the hall.

I thought it would be nice to collect some data from this device, both for some kind of analysis and out of curiosity. I run Home Assistant, which can display dedicated graphs and dashboards for such purpose. And, because I recently played with ESP boards, the idea was born pretty quickly.

I couldn’t find any better phrase that describes the approach I’ve learned in the last year. It’s a simple piece of advice: Test your plans by reducing time.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the amount of our free time is stable and we’ll also be able to spend the same number of hours on things in the future.

Sooner or later, you’ll need to put most of your effort and attention in a specific direction. Eventually, you’ll push every insignificant activity in the background, and you may struggle to find even minutes to deal with the rest of your stuff. Starting of studies, new relationship, new job, starting a family – they are only examples of events that can change your priority. If you want to stick to your routines, you need to change the approach to performing tasks.

When I clone a new project, I put the proper email address (e.g., a company email) as an author email in the local config stored in the repository. It worked fine until I started working for a client whose project is spread across many repositories that I cloned when needed.

I can’t count how many times I forgot to put the correct email into the local config of the newly cloned repository before committing anything into it – just because I was in a rush. In effect, my personal email (which occupies my global configuration) has been leaking many times into commits, sentenced to last forever in the git history. I’ve probably done it more times than I even realize.

To avoid making these mistakes, don’t use a global git configuration for identity.

Some tasks seem easy when we perform them manually, but new things come to light once we want to automate them. What can go wrong if we remove hard spaces from a text file using a script?

If it’s a one-time operation, we run the editor, use the find-and-replace functionality, and that’s enough. Otherwise, we need to find a more automatic-friendly approach.

Some companies send encrypted PDF documents. If you’re a macOS user, Preview will ask you for the password each time you use quick look or open the document. Moreover, if you print that document, you’ll end up with a blank sheet of paper. At least I got it. So secure.

Recently I received notification that somebody post information about my article on Twitter (thanks!). Twitter usually renders a link to blog posts as nice-looking cards. The card to my article shown up without a featured image.

I checked my Twitter feed, and some of my other entries also suffer from missing featured images.

There are a few different methods to enforce a line break in the same paragraph in Markdown syntax: HTML’s <br />, backslash and double space. Let’s consider each case.

I do not use iCloud backup for my iPhone. Instead, I do local encrypted backup, more or less regularly. I wanted to browse and find something from one of these backup.

Did you know, that there is no native way on macOS to browse and restore something from your encrypted iPhone backup? I didn’t.

I struggled with the strange behavior of dhcpcd on my Raspberry Pi powered by Raspbian. The RPi does many things on my local network, including ad-blocking thanks to the pihole service.

I run pihole¹ as a docker container, and it does its job perfectly well. Thanks to the port binding, I could bind port 53 (DNS) directly to the host and use its address as a DNS server.