Andrew Quinn's TILs

One of my more popular open source projects is Shell Bling Ubuntu, which, contrary to its name, actually supports many different operating systems these days: modern macOS, Alpine, Fedora 40 and up, Rocky Linux 8 and up, WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux),…

It is widely known that the Claude Max 20x plan doesn’t buy you just $200 worth of API (Application Programming Interface) credits in a slightly more convenient format.

noslopgrenade.com is a website in the ilk of nohello.com, exhorting the reader not to just copy and paste giant walls of text into the chat.

Scan the Quick Response (QR) code above with your favorite Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) app.

Note for numberphiles: all numbers have been rounded to their first significant digit, because I’m a fan of Rob Eastaway’s “zequals” method of getting to the point when it comes to estimation.

Before GitHub Actions, before GitLab CI/CD, and before the panoply of startups all promising to help you build your software faster and with less hassle, there was the humble, open source Jenkins.

Earlier this weekend, while attempting to hook up a fast background noise remover to a fast subtitle re-aligner, Gemini gave me what might be my new favorite AI hallucination: ### The Fix Try this command: ```bash deepFilter 'audio2anki-output/youtube/S…

As of writing this I can find no Hacker News comments containing both the words “mythos” and “CRA”, which suggests I might have a first-mover advantage in writing something interesting.

I wrote my first Clojure program in anger a few months ago.

I have a suspicion - and let me be clear, that’s all this is, a suspicion, I am taking my own claims even more lightly than usual here - that Claude Code makes most people’s lives better, but it makes the lives of those who struggle with executive function

I use Claude Code.

Lua and Scheme occupy curiously similar places in my noggin, becuase my primary use case for both has been as scripting languages embedded into other, larger projects.

1 2 3 4 5 File Explorer drag & drop ########## (112 MBps) Copy-Item ####### (82 MBps) Built in SFTP client ###### (70 MBps) Built in robocopy (/MT:32) ## (25 MBps) WSL 2 rsync #

As a teenager first getting into computers in the late 2000s I spent a lot of time reading old revered tomes like ESR’s The Art of Unix Programming and SICP .

I began running Andrew’s Selkouutiset Archive almost exactly two years ago, with a simple goal: Create a straightforward way for Finnish language learners to access the simple news broadcast by YYYY-MM-DD.

The cozy world of DevOps has spoiled me with tools like Ansible, Terraform, and Packer.

Most languages have at least one high quality textbook written for secondary learners of the language.

I am an ardent capitalist.

I have been aware of tarsnap for a long time, but only recently did I actually get around to using it for anything, as a result of my big personal digital resiliency audit for 2025.

Quoth “How to Become a Hacker”: 2.

At least not for most use cases.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of economics-inspired solutions to otherwise hard problems.

Spaced repetition has been around for a long time.

N.B.: If I link you to this personally, it is to explain why I usually seem to be in a great mood.

Did you know Vim has a client-server model baked in?

Still images of this GIF are at the bottom.

1 2 3 4 5 +--------------------------+------------------------------------------+ | L2, fixable | L1, intention | +--------------------------+------------------------------------------+ | L2, fixed |

Given my interest in extending the life of my SD cards and hard drives as much as possible, I’m surprised I haven’t come across /dev/shm before.

Earlier today on Hacker News Scrappy made the rounds, with the explicit tagline “make little apps for you and your friends”.

This works as of, at least, Anki 24.06.3.

Language learning for the contemporary adult learner can be broken down roughly into four highly correlated, but distinct, skillsets.

As a nerdy, working-class kid who grew up in the 1990s, knowing what time it actually was was a luxury I rarely had access to before I was 12 or so and my parents finally got an Internet connection with its attendant link to the Network Time Protocol.

Perl 5 went through a long nadir of unpopularity due in large part to its deserved “Write Once, Read Never” reputation.

Below is a GIF of tsk, my pocket Finnish-to-English dictionary, running in my terminal emulator of choice under Linux.

Peanut butter and jelly are complementary goods, as are cars and gasoline, newer cars and electricity, electricity and basically everything else.

If you followed “Binary search isn’t about search” and “Binary search isn’t about search II” properly, the following statements should suffice as a summary: 1 2 L[0:l] < T < L[r:len(L)] # ordinary binary search loop invariant L[0:l] < T <= L[r:len(L)]

In the first “Binary search isn’t about search” post, we spoke about using assert statements to enforce your loop invariants.

Suppose you’re trying to track down a bug that appeared in a series of Git commits.

Before I moved to Finland, I spent some time in the Hobbesian war of all against all that is Wisconsin1.

This is a response to pid1.call’s “Siren Call of SQlite on the Server”, which itself is a response to articles like Wesley Aptekar-Cassels’s “Consider SQLite” espousing SQLite as a server-side technology.

Ever need to download a file from a server – or get someone else to download a file from a server, who may not be comfortable with or should have access to scp or sftp?

Last night I went to DigitalOcean and spun up a tiny new, $4/month droplet – on my own dime!

Epistemic status: Very unclear, also I Am Not A Lawyer This Is Not Legal Advice Get Off My Lawn (N.B.: I"m using “GPL” with broad strokes here, to point at “open source licenses it’s straightforward to run afoul of”.)

What’s the best way to get a job?

If you’ve been following my posts recently, you might have noticed that I’ve been working more and more with PHP lately.

PHP is, for better and for worse, the Python of web dev in my eyes.

First get a working script.

It would have to be finstem, a simple command-line program I wrote to reduce Finnish words down to their root form.

(Inspired by yungporko’s Ask HN post, which got me thinking.)

Poking around in a fresh VM in Vagrant, I see bash dash, a POSIX compliant shell linked under sh python3, 3.11.2 at the time of writing awk, specifically mawk sed, if you count that (I do) perl, specifically Perl 5 There may be others I missed.