julianlam

For the longest time now, I've wanted to clean up and upgrade my Hi-Fi system, although what I had was "good enough" in many respects. I'm not audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, so I've felt that my needs were fairly minimal.

The reasons for having a Hi-Fi system at all were straightforward:

1. I dislike how tinny TV speakers are, and how they point backwards/downwards from the back of the TV
2. Bass response is often lacking — I once watched The Dark Knight at a friend's place, and couldn't get into it because the tiny TV speakers attempting to produce bass would just heavily distort any other sound coming from them.

For reference, my setup was inherited from my parents, who had used it back before I was born!

julianlam

As a cord cutter, I am an advocate of taking advantage of local broadcast signals in my area.

Not sure what kind of channels you'll get? Head on over here and find out

The following is a rough guide as to how to install MythTV on a machine running Pop!_OS 22.04.

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Format the machine to Pop!_OS 22.02

julianlam

No nonsense, just the recipe.

— Julian.

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This is one of my go-tos for a weeknight dinner that is delicious, quick and easy to prepare, and does not break the bank.

Ingredients

julianlam

I have an electric stove. It came with my house.

As an aside, since I moved into my house in 2015, every single major appliance in my kitchen has had some sort of defect. I suppose it says something about the quality of appliances nowadays.

One day the front 10-inch burner stopped working. Too bad, it was my favourite one!

A house call from a repairman later, I was told that the most likely culprit was the infinite switch behind the panel. Unfortunately, this ends the repairman's role, as he soon stopped returning my calls. Apparently, this was too small a job for him.

Complicating matters is that appliance manufacturers seem to have hundreds (if not thousands, by now) of models, all with subtle variations and combinations of parts, features, aesthetics, etc. There are some good websites that help you find out which part goes with which stove, but sometimes they have contradictory information too.

julianlam

You can't cd in xargs because xargs is not a shell... or something. You have to invoke bash.

ls -1 directory | xargs -n1 -I{} bash -c 'cd {}; echo foobar'

Use -t if you want to see the resulting command executed.

julianlam

This is a living document, it will be updated from time to time as my test writing evolves.

It's easy to fall into the trap of writing your tests with less care than you would your regular code. After all, if tests pass, then ship it is de rigeur, so there's an incentive — especially if the clock is ticking closer to the end of workday — to get those tests passing ASAP.

Avoid globals/leaky states

One corner that is often cut is to introduce or reuse variables between tests. For example:

1. I am writing tests for updating a user's profile. I will create one user and run all tests against that single user.

julianlam

Sometimes you just need to prune a directory of all files older than a certain age. Think log files, or uploaded files... maybe ~/Downloads, perhaps?

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -mtime +90 -delete

• mindepth and maxdepth stop find from crashing if there are too many files
• mtime specifies instructs find to filter the files by the last modified time. +90 means 90 days
• delete is self-explanatory

julianlam

var	passport = module.parent.require('passport'),
	passportLocal = module.parent.require('passport-local').Strategy,
	plugin = {};

plugin.login = function() {
	winston.info('[login] Registering new local login strategy');
	passport.use(new passportLocal({passReqToCallback: true}, plugin.continueLogin));
};

plugin.continueLogin = function(req, username, password, next) {

julianlam

Those that know me know that I don't exactly have a great relationship with neat cabling practices. My desktop PC builds are rather haphazard, with power cables, SATA cables, and the like snaking across and through the case with no regard for aesthetics. After all, plug A needs to go to socket A, why not take the most direct route? Brace yourselves...

Accordingly, the same work ethic seemed to follow me into my home networking setup. Through a combination of organic growth (new devices added over time), and due to the added incentive of needing to get connected ASAP when we moved in, little to no thought was put to making everything look neat and tidy.

I'll spare you the imagery, but some lovely faults:

1. A DSL line that entered the house via a demarcation point at one end of the house, only to snake across the entire length of the house before actually entering

julianlam

I came across a scenario where I had a certificate (example.org, below) that supported multiple domains, but one domain's (broken.example.org, below) the A record no longer existed, causing certbot to abort renewals with an error:

Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Processing /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/example.org.conf
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Cert is due for renewal, auto-renewing...
Plugins selected: Authenticator webroot, Installer None