The incumbent was just more flexible — I have a project that basically creates a custom Debian distribution image. This distribution image provides the operating system for custom hardware. There was a desire to use Containers for building this image as the process seems well suited for that. After working with it for a while I have…

Reflecting on my most popular article — I wrote an article in October about my journey as a developer. In that article I explained why I felt that shifting from PHP to Node.js was the right choice for me. I have to say I was surprised at the feedback I got. …

Remove prompts from your command line scripts — I had a recent task to automate building a custom Debian image, using some custom software wrapped up as *.deb packages. These packages are stored in an local APT repository via reprepro (also created and populated by our script). The problem I kept running into was my script would prompt…

For when you have many network interfaces — The short version: ip addr show $(ip route | awk '/default/ { print $5 }') | grep "inet" | head -n 1 | awk '/inet/ {print $2}' | cut -d'/' -f1 We use ip route and awk to determine the name of our default network interface We use ip addr to get the…

Secondary and soft skills are just as important — I have been writing code for the past couple of decades. Through it all I pushed myself to be able to create applications that would solve more and more complex needs. I have done a great deal of research to expand my dev skills and knowledge to the point that…

One possible solution — I recently updated my Intel NUC (model NUC6i7KYK) to run MX Linux instead of the original Debian install I had on the box. Everything is running great out of the box. Except Blender. Finding out why took a bit of sleuthing. Short form — firing up Blender with the INTEL_DEBUG=reemit…

Results after printing for a month — Last month I installed the Ender Extender 400 kit on to my Ender 3 Pro. When I wrote up my original article I was still working through the last couple of tweaks I needed to ensure the printer would work as expected. …

OMG it is HUGE! — I have applied the Ender Extender 400 to my Ender 3 Pro. There are some gotcha’s that need to be considered over and above the extender kit. The Creality Ender 3, Ender 3 Pro, Ender 3 V2, and Ender 5 printers are popular 3D printers. These are relatively simple to…

From zero to productive coding in a few minutes — I have just started another Node.JS project and noticed how fast I was able to go from concept to writing productive code. By productive code I mean code that applies to the project, not “foundational” work needed to get the coding environment ready for your project. I’m sharing how I…