PDFs can be generated programmatically in several ways. A common use case is converting a website to PDF, but some of the tools listed below work for other use cases too. Converting a website to PDF If you’re okay with text not being selectable or searchable, you could use html-to-image to turn the site into images, and then put the images into a new PDF with jsPDF. Use JPEGs so the resulting file isn’t too big....
Restic and Time Machine (TM) are backup programs that complement each other with their different strengths and weaknesses. I now use both: Restic for remote backups and Time Machine for most local backups. Platforms TM is only available for MacOS while Restic runs almost anywhere. Ease of use TM is much easier to use than Restic. When you connect an external drive to your computer, a popup will appear asking if you want to back up your computer to that drive....
Here’s a way to install Ansible that’s easier and more likely to work than the official instructions. Install uv if you haven’t already uv tool install ansible-core That’s it. You should now be able to use commands such as ansible, ansible-playbook, etc.
Immich is a self-hosted alternative to Google Photos. I’ve been running an instance for a few months now, and it’s great. Immich’s docs has a sample NGINX config, but there are a few changes you’ll probably want to make to it. Prevent indexing In the location / { ... } block, you should probably add a line that says add_header X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"; to prevent search engine crawlers from indexing your site....
On 2025-12-9, I tested the cross-compilation of the official Svelte template of Wails v2.11.0, a desktop app framework for Go, on my amd64 laptop running Ubuntu 24 with Go v1.25.5. Of course, the results may change in the future as Wails and Go are being improved. Go is known for making cross-compilation much easier than most other languages, and that is mostly still true when using frameworks like Wails. Creating executable files and/or installers for each of several platforms is sometimes as simple as listing those platforms in a command:...
A software project generator sets up the starting boilerplate for a project, filling in the new project’s name and other details in various places throughout the new files. Project generators make starting new projects much faster and lowers the barrier to quickly trying an idea. Their output can be much more reliable than that of LLMs. Like all tools, they are useful in some situations and less so in others....
Python has several ways to make a program exit. exit should probably only be used to exit a Python REPL because it’s not safe to assume it’s defined. The sys.exit function is safe, but you might prefer to raise SystemExit instead because: they do the same thing and have the same interface sys.exit requires an additional import (import sys) sys.exit raises SystemExit without being explicit about the fact it raises an exception You can exit with a status code, such as raise SystemExit(0) or raise SystemExit(1)....
Sometimes it’s helpful to copy a Git repository directly from one machine to another without using a Git host like GitHub. If you can SSH into the machine(s) involved, you can use Bash’s rsync command. Rsync’s defaults aren’t great for copying repos for several reasons, but a Bash script can fix that. I named the script ,cp-repo (copy repo): ,cp-repo . staging:/home/chris/repos/url-shortener This copies the current directory (.) to /home/chris/repos/url-shortener in a machine named staging as defined in an SSH config file....
Just is a tool for defining and running custom commands for specific projects. Justfiles are often compared favorably to makefiles. If you’re new to Just, check out Just Programmer’s Manual. A command definition in a justfile (a recipe) usually contains code written in the system’s default shell language, but Just lets you choose from many other languages including Python! This is especially great because it allows more recipes to be cross-platform....
During the time I’ve been making browser extensions, I’ve learned about the amazing things they can do and how helpful they are, but also how dangerous they can be. Below are some examples of risks and ways to mitigate them. Some of the risks Even though browsers put limits on what extensions can do and require them to ask permission for some things, extensions can still do more than what most people expect....