Category Archives: aide-memoire

(Virtual) Server Pricing

04 Tuesday Jun 2019

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My goto services:

#FREE => Heroku (but only one “VM” is free, then $7/mo for a 512Mb “Dyno”)

Super Cheap => OVH
don’t have an affiliate program AFAIK, cuz they’re so low cost 😦

Blend => Digital Ocean
Use my aff. link to sign up, you get $100, I get $10, everyone’s happy 🙂
Here => https://m.do.co/c/728c8434e1b1

Digital Ocean
Special sauce: Incredible UI/UX, super fun to use. I’ve stopped thinking about it anymore, when I need a VM, I just go to DO.

Downsides: Many (probably most?) of the IPs are blacklisted for email. Most aren’t great exits for VPN services either for the same reason.

CLI tool (doctl) has pretty shit UX; could have been so much better. But still it’s there and works in a pinch		$5/GB of RAM
Linode$5/GB of RAM
OVH
Special sauce: The lowest cost option, but it’s Canada and Europe only. No SE Asia, no USA.		$1.68/GB of RAM
Yep it’s 66% cheaper than everyone else.
Vultr
Special sauce: awesome plans with $2.50 for a node with IPv6 only, 512Mb RAM. 		$5/Gb
Amazon LightSail
Special Sauce: oh well, it’s the IBM of servers, so I might as well document it here: They have this clone of Digital Ocean, called LightSail, that s3cks, obvs. It’s the same price as Linode/DO/Vultr. Available in a few more locations than most of the above (incl. Mumbai; Digital Ocean has Bangalore).

When to use: All the rest of your infra is on Amazon Cloud and you’re pathethic.		$5/GB of RAM
Heroku #FREE (owned by Salesforce, not indie and chill like they pretend)
Incredibly good tooling; 1x 512Mb Dyno is free (1000 Hours/mo if you verify with a credit card). Gets very expensive very fast though — because you are subsidising the development of developer tools and the “free” tier.		$14-$50/Gb of RAM
Prices as of June 5, 2019.

I may update this page someday, but then again I may not 🙂 Bookmark if you’re adventurous (ctrl + d, or cmd + d)

Online IDEs for quick prototypes

09 Tuesday Apr 2019

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#Frontend

Codepen.io: Really great for prototyping layouts and CSS in general.
Recently added Flutter support

  • React: ✔
  • Svelte: x
  • Flutter: ✔
  • JS: ✔ (but not very good …)
  • Private Pens: ✔ (Paid)
  • Secrets: x
  • Deploy to Netlify (or now.sh): x

Codesandbox.io: Webpack + VS Code as an online IDE

#Fullstack (include a VM/Container for development)

Glitch.com: #fullstack, #millenial, #awesome, #secrets

Glitch + Fly.io is very fly!

Repl.it: #fullstack, #secrets, #paid-for-private-repls
Has secrets (.env file that is only accessible by repl owner)

Runkit: The best way to hack nodejs ‘scripts’, IMHO
#backend

Codeanywhere, $8/mo

Stackblitz:
VSCode in the Cloud

#secrets  = .env file that is only accessible by repl owner

Archived

C9.io: Was really nice, but it’s been bought by Amazon; not free anymore, unless you use AWS 😭

Do you know others that should be on this list? Like, subscribe and Leave a comment below!

 

macOS Productivity Apps every dev needs!

10 Monday Sep 2018

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Window Management/Misc Util

Spectacle, Free, Open Source
BetterTouchTool, Donationware
Magnet , Mac App Store, about $2.

Winner: BetterTouchTool

Spectacle App is really, really good window management; shortcuts to dock windows to left/right half (or quadrants, or top/bottom) of screen. Some stuff, like hitting the ‘dock right’ shortcut (ctrl + cmd + right) twice makes a window use the right third then right half then right 3/4ths etc. It’s just magically good. Having said that you can replicate (95%) the functionality of Spectacle App with BTT and since BTT does Window Management and Keyboard/Mouse Remapping and so much more – it makes sense to use BTT alone. 

Magnet is Spectacle App with the added ability to dock windows on drag (i.e. drag to top of screen to make a window full screen). BTT does this out of the box too; but takes it further… BTT lets you define snap areas / layouts and activate them using the mouse alone!

BTT does not come batteries included, so you have to make your own shortcuts and assign window management operations to them. There’s a community forum for sharing presets but it’s still a chore. Also BTT can do Touchbar based Window Management (though I’ve not found that very useful; and I hate the touchbar anyways).

Application Launcher / Search Everywhere

Alfred, Freemium

Better spotlight, including deep integration with Google / Gmail / Drive and other custom searches (via plugins). Really good, no competition here. No discussion, just install it and thank me later.

Alfred Workflows

Note Taking

OneNote, Free, Proprietary 

The best note taking app out there. Period. I’d say Apple Notes is now the best note taking app out there, because it’s so fast and has great integration with iOS & macOS. The web version is not too shabby either. It’s not very cross platform though and if you have thousands of notes (as I do) sync breaks every now and then. It doesn’t have all the “nice” touches of OneNote – like napkin math or keyboard shortcuts to apply styles like Heading 1, Heading 2 etc.

Screen Sharing / Collaboration

ScreenHero (now owned/murdered by Slack)

AnyDesk

TeamViewer: The free version just randomly stops workign for me — it says commercial use detected and stops. So AnyDesk, though TeamViewer is very good.

Other:

CleanMyMacX, Freemium 

Itsycal, Freemium

Developer Tools 

  • PHPStorm
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Homebrew,

Homebrew packages/bottles: 

brew install php swaks htop telnet ffmpeg mysql pstree aria2 pv q jq autojump keychain nmap readline node redis beanstalkd ripgrep rsnapshot wget rsync bzip2 git xz yarn speedtest-cli parallel composer go sqlite curl grep sshfs coreutils

Other Stuff

Google Chrome, FireFox, Microsoft Edge (Chrome)

XCode

Office 365

Parallels Desktop

Coconut Battery

WhatsApp (Desktop)

Blackmagic Speed Test

Amphetamine

Reeder

Dropbox

Tinkerwell

VLC

Beyond Compare: Don’t leave home without this!

Paw

SuperDuper

(Git) Tower 2

Docker

Pocket

SecurePDF

XQuartz

Calibre

Intel Power Gadget

Mailplane

Backup and Sync from Google

MacDown

WireGuard

MySQL Workbench

Skype

OpenAudible

Resolutionator

Local By Flywheel

JetBrains Toolbox

Trello

GIPHY Capture

Yoink!

OpenInTerminal

MacsFanControl

Trader Workstation (IB)

 

Docker ❤️ Parallels ❤️ OS X (El-Capitan)

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

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Getting started with Docker + Parallels on OS X (using Homebrew)

Update: Sep 2016: This is no longer relevant; best to download Docker for Mac which uses xhyve to virtualize the Docker Engine environment and Linux kernel-specific features on OS X. This allows for much easier sharing of files between your local machine and docker containers.

Want to use Docker on OS X? At the moment, the OS X kernel does not directly support containers like Docker or OpenVZ. So you have to run a VM with docker installed. You then use the Docker CLI to interact with the Docker (daemon) running on the VM. The whole process is actually very easy to setup now that Docker Machine supports the Parallels driver.

Assumptions: You already have Parallels (11, Business or Pro Edition) and Homebrew installed.

$> brew update  # need to brew with a recent version
$> brew upgrade
$> brew install docker docker-machine docker-machine-parallels
… grab some coffee…
$> docker-machine create -d parallels dev1
$> eval `docker-machine env dev1`
$> docker run hello-world

All done!

You are now ready to use Docker, Docker Composer and even Docker Swarm.

#iptables forward an IP address to another

15 Wednesday Apr 2015

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Using #iptables to forward a whole IP address to another (server)

iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -d $src -j DNAT --to $dst
iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -d $dst -j MASQUERADE

Connections from anywhere to $src will get forwarded to $dst (though source IP will be changed to that of eth0 or default outbound device). Useful when moving servers; keeps the old address alive for a bit. Though we lose ‘real’ source address.

For example, if forwarding IP address used by an SMTP server, all email will appear to come from $eth0. If $eth0 (could be the same as $src, but not guaranteed) is privileged, in the sense that it is allowed to relay, then anyone will be able to relay through the SMTP server. But works in a pinch, while DNS changes are propogating through the ‘net.

A somewhat more concrete example. Say you have IP address 1.2.3.4; if you do

iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -d 1.2.3.4 -j DNAT --to 8.8.8.8
iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -d 8.8.8.8 -s 1.2.3.4 -j MASQUERADE

1.2.3.4 is now forwards to Google’s Public DNS Server. You can now use 1.2.3.4 as if it were 8.8.8.8.

Proxmox 1.9 – Resize virtual disk

31 Thursday May 2012

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I just had to resize a virtual disk and it was harder than I thought; writing down what I did so it’s easy to find …

  1. shutdown VM 
    qm shutdown 108
  2. resize disk image 
    qemu-img resize vm-108-disk-1.qcow2 +20G
  3. attach pmagic CD; boot to pmagic (using proxmox management web interface)
  4. extend physical partition 
    pvdisplay; lvdisplay; 
fdisk -u=sectors /dev/sda
delete partition 2 (remember starting sector) (‘d’, 2)
create new partition (n) starting at same sector as before; end is defaulted
  5. extend pv 
    pvresize –v /dev/sda2
  6. extend lv 
    lvresize –L +20G VolGroup/lv_root
  7. resize filesystem 
    e2fsck –f /dev/sda2
resize2fs /dev/sda2
  8. detach pmagic cdrom
  9. start VM 
    qm start 108

 

Good instructions for working with Windows (NTFS) disk images is here: http://cauldrondevelopment.com/blog/2009/02/26/resize-qemu-ntfs-image/

₹ ₹ ₹ Using the new Indian Rupee Symbol (in Word, Excel etc.)

26 Thursday May 2011

Posted by in aide-memoire, lifehack, programming

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Microsoft provides updated fonts in a hotfix which is available from here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2496898. The hotfix works with Office, Excel, Word and most Windows applications, including browsers.

After installing the hotfix, you can enter unicode characters using “charmap.exe”. In Windows, press the WIN and R keys, type charmap and press enter.

image

charmap

Whether you use the official (Microsoft supplied) hotfix or download a font like Foradian, people who you send your document to, may not have the requisite fonts. Word, Excel, PDF allow you to embed your own fonts, but there’s not much you can do for websites (sure you can do a lot of CSS work and embed your own fonts, but it won’t work with a lot of browsers out there). When sharing docs with people, you can also use the older U+20A8 symbol (₨).

Inserting the older symbol is not much different, and you can use charmap.

image

Old Rupee symbol U+20A8 ₨
New Rupee symbol U+20B9 ₹

 

Another side-effect of installing the hot-fix is that Excel’s “currency format” dropdown now has a Rupee format available:

image

Also see: “Three Ways to enter Unicode characters in Windows”

To use Indian formatting for numbers (i.e. Lakh, Crore instead of Millions) see this article: “Indian Currency format in Excel”