Category Archives: aide-memoire

macOS Allow CLI binaries from third-party devs

01 Friday Apr 2022

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macOS Big Sur (apparently from macOS Catalina onwards) restricts binaries from third-parties. This sux when using cli apps like alfred-plugins.

Allow CLI app: spctl --add /full/path/to/my/app

Show all rules: spctl --list

Disable Gatekeeper: sudo spctl --master-disable

Another was to achive the same result: Hold ⌥ (option) when opening app in Finder; this will fail but give you the option to “open anyway”. If you forget to hold ⌥ or it does not work, try opening anyways, then open System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> General; click the Open Anyway button.

Rating: Bad Apple.
Good intentions (methinks), but Apple’s gonna lock down macOS, just like it locks down iOS today. 😔. This is one more arrow in their quiver.

Enterprise / Server Cloud Storage (not “Personal” cloud storage)

02 Saturday Jan 2021

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Cheapest:

  • Backblaze B2: $5/Tb/mo (data transfer: $10/Tb)
  • Wasabi Storage: $5/Tb/mo (data transfer: ??)
  • OVH physical server: $3/Tb/mo (zero data transfer and other charges, but you do need to setup ZFS and some API layer software yourself).

Backblaze and Wasabi are both S3 compatible object stores. Note that data transfer can easily dominate storage charges, for even somewhat frequently accessed data. OVH is therefore much cheaper than it appears.

Other Options

  • google / gcloud: $10/Tb/mo
    • 1 Tb  => $10/mo ($120/pa)
    • Nearline (USA): 1000 * 0.01 => $10/mo (Using prices for nearline storage, South Carolina data center)
    • Nearline (Mumbai): 1000 * $0.016 = $16/mo ($200/pa)
    • Nearline has some charges if stored for less than 30d (min term). So could be a bit more than $10 (perhaps the same as S3’s intelligent tiering)
  • amazon / s3
    • 1 Tb => $12.5/mo  (between $12.5 and $20 because intelligent tiering will take some time to kick in).
    • Using prices for S3 Intelligent Tiering, USA data center: 1000 * 0.0125 => $12.5
  • Digital Ocean / volumes: (Block storage built on Ceph)
    • 1 Tb => $100/mo (approx 10x S3 prices, yiiikes.)
    • rsync’able storage
  • Digital Ocean / spaces: $0.02 gb/mo (S3 Compatible File Storage)
    • 1 Tb => $20/mo (about the same as S3 without intelligent tiering)
  • Backblaze B2: $5/Tb/mo
    • $10/Tb data transfer; cheaper than Amazon, but can still dominate.
    • S3 compatible API

Max value

Store HOT on Digital Ocean spaces (save on bandwidth)

Move older items to gcloud nearline or lower tier

#[[Hosting / Servers / Cloud Guide]]

“Free” SQL Databases

29 Tuesday Dec 2020

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  • Heroku Postgres
    • Good & simple
  • IBM DB2: No credit card required, re-activate by email every 90 days
    • 200 MB of data storage
    • 15 simultaneous connections
    • Shared multitenant system
  • “Always free” Oracle Cloud instance (ptooie, slow as molasses) + apt install postgres
  • Supabase: Postgres, realtime, kinda like Firebase but with SQL and a real postgres instance. Free while in beta
  • Recommendations:

Timeseries Databases

20 Sunday Dec 2020

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,

tl;dr use Timescale (open source extensions to postgres) – All the power, expressivity and ease of SQL w/horizontal scalability via partitioning. Like your own, Amazon RedShift. Faster and obvs. much cheaper than RedShit.

Other options:

  • InfluxDb (and cloud) – simplicity of ingest
  • ElasticSearch – needs a custom browse component (Kibana too complex)
  • Clickhouse, Vertica, Pilosa and others – “exotic” options, not really worth the effort, esp. given how good TimescaleDb is.

How to ingest:

  • v0: statsD -> influx (fast, cheap, quick, scalable)
  • v2 rsyslog (on each server) => central rsyslog => beanstalkd / kafka => (fan out) postgres (timescaledb) + mongo + influx + es

(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)