Alberta Sovereignty Act leaves a bad tase. Politics has always been full of shenanigans. More so with the MAGA movement in the US and the extremism embracing the “right” parties around the world lately. Alberta, Canada has seen some of this extremist mentality creep into its local politics. Recently the…

I just installed a new Debian system with KDE for my desktop. I was able to see my devices in the Bluetooth manager. I was even able to begin pairing. But the devices refused to connect. Instead I would get a generic “Protocol not available” error. The fix: I needed to install…

Join me on my crash learning efforts with Python — I’ve been writing code professionally since around December 1999. In that time I have seen various languages as my career took me to different areas. It seems that Python was always there in the background, but never quite the “right” answer for the tasks I was working on. …

How I fixed it Outlook supports a Progressive Web application (PWA). However I could not get it installed with Chrome. Changing the language in Outlook solved the problem for me. I’m running Google Chrome on my Debian desktop system. Work requires me to use Office 365, and therefore MS Outlook…

Or, am I just being impatient? — I have a handful of domains that are primarily used for email purposes. Over the years I have had to move these domains to different mail providers. I have just done this exercise again and have learned a valuable lesson. TLDR: Zoho has been a horrible experience I cannot recommend…

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…