Technology

Recently, I need to transfer some humongous video files, with a estimated time of 16 hours 😳 Every time I turned my back for a moment, my MacBook immediately went to sleep and cancelled the transfer. No amount of swearing or fiddling with the settings solved the problem. Has anyone actually counted the number of power and sleep settings in MacOS? Anyway, finally, I found two neat solutions to this problem, both of which involve stimulants. ...

After months of faffing around and configuring external links manually in Hugo, I decided there must be a better way. There is! Here’s the solution that worked for me for my bookstore links. Some themes include native support, so it’s a case of checking the documentation and adding a line to your hugo.yaml or hugo.toml config file. If, like me, you’re using a theme that doesn’t support this feature, here’s a method that might work for you. ...

I’ve been an enthusiastic user of AudioPen for a few years. This brilliant app records and accurately transcribes your voice notes in moments. You can either opt for a light tidy to add punctuation and remove your ums and ahs, or ask it to make you sound like Cicero. Although you can organise your notes in AudioPen using folders and tags, most of us nerdy types already have a preferred note-taking app. In my case, that’s Obsidian. If you don’t know Obsidian, it’s a powerful yet simple app that stores your notes and plain markdown files and gives you various ways to make connections between them. ...

Hugo is usually the simple solution for website generation. Recently, though, I ran into a frustrating situation: the theme I wanted to use for one site required an older version of Hugo, whereas another site demanded the latest version. Although it’s possible to run multiple Hugo versions on the same machine, life is already complicated enough. In this tutorial, I’ll explain how you can build and preview a Hugo site with a Docker container. ...

So far in this series, we’ve created some very simple Kubernetes applications. If you built something more complicated, with dozens of manifests, it would be a faff to share it with other people. Those other people might also struggle to understand and tweak your configuration. With a Helm Chart, you can define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes application. For instance, I worked for a CI/CD company which offered a self-hosted Kubernetes-based version of its product. Rather than having to create lots of different Kubernetes resources, customers instead received a Helm Chart with everything already mapped out - all the Deployments, Secrets, Users, and ConfigMaps. They then configured some of the values and installed the chart on their own Kubernetes cluster. ...

One of the many advantages of Helm is that it gives you a one-command installation method for many popular apps. It would take a while to create all the necessary Pods, Services, and ConfigMaps manually. In this tutorial, I’ll guide you through a two-step process for installing WordPress with Helm. Although this isn’t necessarily something you’d want to do in the real world, it’s good for understanding the basics. I was very excited when I first got this working. ...

Last time, we created a simple manifest to launch a Kubernetes deployment. Although we found a Pod lurking in minikube dashboard, we couldn’t actually see anything interesting. In this tutorial, we’ll extend that manifest to include a Service and make the app available through a web browser. As before, you’ll need minikube and associated tools, all of which are detailed in an earlier post. Exposing your Pod To make the Pod containing the app visible, you need to expose the container’s port. This involves a small addition to the original manifest file: ...

In my previous post, I showed you how to create a Kubernetes deployment imperatively at the command line. Although this is a quick method, it’s not a good choice for real-world scenarios. You need code that’s properly documented and version controlled. Now we’re going to use a declarative approach. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a simple Kubernetes deployment with a manifest file. Make sure minikube is running with minikube start before following the steps below. Hop over to that previous tutorial if you need instructions on installing minikube and related tools. ...

One of my first tasks as a technical writer was to document a Kubernetes-based release orchestration tool. Not daunting at all. At that time, I could provide a vague description of Kubernetes, but hadn’t the foggiest idea what it actually looked like. There aren’t many opportunities in life to just play with a Kubernetes cluster - at least, not without spending thousands of dollars on AWS. Fortunately, I discovered minikube, a free solution for installing a single-node cluster Kubernetes on your local machine. With this setup, I’ve been able to experiment with various products and projects. Thanks to a couple of clever add-ons, you can even simulate load balancers and DNS servers, too. ...

Introduction Jekyll is a beautifully simple way to build and deploy a static website. Well, it’s simple once you’ve got everything installed and configured. Unless you’re already confident with Ruby, it’ll probably take you most of a wet weekend to get it running consistently. Although the local installation is working well for me, I’m nervous it’ll break. I’m already encountering a few Ruby conflicts with other projects. Resolving those issues isn’t my idea of fun. Given I’ve been doing a lot of work with Docker lately, I decided to see whether I could run my site as a container instead. Plot spoiler: yes, I could! ...