The ramblings of a computer geek
A simple function that takes a DateTime in the format: 2023-11-29T06:41:20-08:00 and outputs it in a much more pretty: 29/11/2023 06:41:20 -0800. As you can see its switching to the DDMMYY date format, followed by the time and finally the timezone.
Read in JSON from a file and convert into a Dictionary For example I was testing getting data from the Slack service status API, so wanted to simulate broken-ness to test my script was working correctly. I did this by creating a file with a sample set of JSON that showed a problem, as I … Read more
DISCLAIMER: Ensure you consult with a certified electrician, the below is for information only and is not to be taken as guidance on what you should or should not do, it is merely a detail of what I found. Our Ei Electronics Ei166RC smoke detector started to go off at random intervals, we have 3 … Read more
Creating a user account with a home directory and setting the default shell as BASH, can be done as follows, add “sudo” to the front as required. If you need your account to have sudo rights, you can specify the “sudo” group upon creation, as follows:
I’m not sure if this is best necessarily best practice (so please comment below). I had the need to be using SSH key based authentication a lot. So rather than manually running the SSH Agent and then adding my private key (which then meant entering the passphrase on each use), I added this to my … Read more
I have multiple monitors, it can be a pain to line them up using the Windows Control Panel too “Rearrange Your Displays”, sometimes you can’t quite get them to line up, what this means is sometimes your mouse will get stuck going between screens. A way round this is to use this neat little tool: … Read more
Tailscale is a great little tool to allow you to setup your VPN between all sorts of devices and without the worry about issues like Firewalls or setting up VPN servers/concentrators. There’s loads of documentation on how to setup Tailscale, so I won’t repeat that here, but i’ll run through a quick example of something … Read more
I had an issue where my Google Chrome kept on signing me out of my profile every time I closed the browser. Now, there may be a few reasons for this, and you may even want this as a desired approach, but in my case I didn’t want it logging me out of the profile … Read more
Although its becoming increasingly rare nowadays to be using un-encrypted connections, let’s see what it really means at the network level. Un-encrypted connections on their own are not necessarily a problem, its all about what value what you are sending has and therefore what could be exposed to a nefarious actor. If you are viewing … Read more
When working with Git repositories on the Linux command line, it can often be helpful to see the branch on which you are using at the command prompt, rather than having to identify the branch via a command like “git branch”. To install it just run: Then logout and back in again to reload your … Read more