vxlabs

This page contains a list of all of the blog posts on this site, grouped by year.

Preview This post documents how you can use a lesser known authorized_keys config to give AI agents (or anything else) programmatically designed and limited access to any resources and tools on a different system, for example the system hosting the agent…

I recently setup Quartz to publish a subset of my “howto” notes to the TiL section of my website.

Zotero is a fantastic open-source reference manager that I’ve been using and blogging about since 2011.

Web Key Directory (WKD) “is a standard for discovery of OpenPGP keys by email address, via the domain of its email provider”.

Background During my work at Stone Three upgrading some of our data pipelines with Azure DataBricks, I was quite disappointed to learn that Spark 3.5.3’s only timezone-capable timestamp type always stores timestamps converted to UTC, and always displays t…

Problem You’ve setup a local Spark 3.5.3 cluster for development user the bitnami docker images and compose file, you’ve hooked up your PySpark SparkSession and then when you try to df.limit(10).toPandas().head() for the first time, you are greeted with t…

The new Python package and project manager uv is in fact amazing.

It took me longer than I would have liked to setup the latest Thunderbird 128 (Supernova!)

lf, or “list files”, is a single binary file manager, inspired by the ranger file manager, but written in Go.

Last week Microsoft had to deal with some criticism, because they announced “Recall”, a new feature, available only on their new Copilot+ AI-enabled laptops, that makes regular screenshots as the computer is used and uses on-device models to generate desc…

LTTB, or Largest-Triangle-Three-Buckets, is a fantastic little algorithm that you can use for the visual downsampling of timeseries data.

Introduction Just the other weekend, I had to exchange contact details using quite primitive means with a fantastic new friend after a deeply enjoyable hike up Table Mountain via the India Venster route.

Background I was curious whether it would in theory be possible to use the docx format as a storage format for markdown documents with their associated image files, and in addition, to support the light editing of the docx file directly.

The blurb Below is the emacs-lisp code I’ve evolved over the years to setup reasonable font sizes on all the machines where I use Emacs.

This morning while working on my AoC submission, I wondered what the simplest procedure was for sharing a minimal setup for editing Python in Visual Studio Code using ruff for formatting, linting and import sorting, and doing all of that automatically on…

Install and configure hunspell Imagine this: For intricate reasons, you have decided to get your Emacs setup working on Windows as well, although you have a perfectly fine and working WSL2 configuration.

This is a small variation of the 2019 post on linking to emails from Org mode using Thunderbird, where instead we show how to open the message:// links with mu4e if active, or the fastmail web-app if it is not.

Introduction Python’s ThreadPoolExecutor’s context manager is a really neat way to run a bunch of (I/O) work in a thread pool, and then clean everything up when the context is exited.

Background For years and years now, I keep all of my work, including my checked-out source code, in some form of file synchronization system.

Background My notes database consists primarily of Emacs Org mode files, interspersed with a small number of markdown files, some of them from previous note-taking systems (for example, I went through a Gollum stage early in 2014, according to my notes th…

You’ll see in Python bug 37962 that datetime.isoformat() and datetime.fromisoformat() use a restricted subset of the ISO 8601 timestamp formatting standards.

In this post, I show how to setup Emacs for TypeScript and React (tsx) development, with tree-sitter for syntax highlighting and indentation, and LSP with the TypeScript compiler (including a plugin for faster eslint), via eglot, for code intelligence.

This post shows how you can connect a Shelly 1 unit to an ET Systems gate motor so that you can open your driveway gate via internet.

In this post I show how you can setup a Kubernetes pod for reproducible development purposes on a single-node Kubernetes cluster using Rancher Desktop on Linux or Docker Desktop for Windows.

Imagine the following possibly hypothetical situation: You work in an organization or team that is heavily Python-focused, primarily due to operating in application domains where scientific computing is important.

The wonderful Emacs Org mode is the basis for the largest part of my personal knowledge management system.

This post is reproduced here with permission from The OrgMode ExoCortex. org-roam v2, which was recently released, removed the update database on idle functionality (which I coincidentally contributed) as part of its simplification.

Welcome to open source vxlabs software development handbook.

Recently the great support folks at FastMail helped me to debug a rather irritating issue where emails that had languished in my inbox for too long, and were then processed by me to end up in the Archive folder, would get the date of archival assigned as…

On the various and different platforms where I use Emacs and GnuPG encryption, I’ve traditionally always had a bit of a struggle setting up a suitable mechanism for private key passphrase entry, or pinentry.

Recently, as I replaced more of my Emacs-helm configuration with counsel and ivy, I noticed that ivy-switch-buffer, when augmented by ivy-rich, was not showing the directories of the buffers it was listing.

Welcome to the first entry in a new series that’s probably going to stop with this first entry, or maybe not.

You might have noticed the side-note in yesterday’s blog post where I mentioned that exporting Orgmode notes with org-download attachment-style screenshots to blog posts using ox-hugo required one to convert [[attachment:...]]

Pylance is Microsoft’s new and improved Python language server.

From the department of how-obscure-can-you-get-really, I present you with this neat trick to open WSL2 files in their native Windows handlers via Emacs TRAMP connection from WSL1 to WSL2.

On Windows, running Emacs on WSL (the Windows Subsystem for Linux, or rather Linux in Windows), is faster and in my experience an altogether a better experience than running native Windows Emacs.

This post originally appeared at Org Mode Exocortex, my Org mode-focused blog, on April 30, 2020.

Warning on 2021-06-21: Don’t try this work-around With a pandoc 2.5 installation on Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS I am not able to get this hack working anymore.

TL;DR: Install my WSL-specific xdg-open replacement by following the instructions on the xdg-open-wsl github page.

Background.

Previously I wrote how to get the WlzIIPSrv large image server running on webfaction, using lighttpd.

Background I recently joined the Windows Insider Program, on the slow ring, to be able to test a development version of the soon-to-be-released Windows Subsystem for Linux, version 2, henceforth WSL 2.

TL;DR.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I switched from a 2017 15" MacBook Pro to a Thinkpad X1 Extreme in April of this year.

As I recently changed my imap downloading tool choice from offlineimap to mbsync, and because the word on the street (where with “street” I mean “random discussion forums on the internet”) is that mbsync is generally faster than offlineimap, I wanted to r…

These days I’m running mu4e, the mail programme that runs on the Emacs operating system (the one with the terrible editor), on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

On Wednesday, May 8, 2019, South Africans had the opportunity to elect their leaders for the coming five years by taking part in the 2019 general election.

This post documents my measurements of the slow-down caused by the Windows 10 (1903) anti-virus real-time protection of Hugo static website builds, both with and without the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

On macOS, links of the form message://message-id are by default supported by the system.