I was recently reading Mike Grindle's In The Margins newsletter about “Getting feedback from yourself”, and it occurred to me that I could be sharing a lot more than I currently am.
Over the years, I have put together a lot of scripts to make my life a bit easier. A lot of these revolve around my blogging workflow or transferring files from my server to my NAS.
I haven't shared these because they are either not perfect or are specialised to my specific use case. As Winston Churchill famously said “perfection is the enemy of progress”.
In this case, it is not my progress I am talking about but the progress of others. I am hoping that sharing more may inspire others to start a project or find a new way of doing things.
If you are interested I am going to be sharing my scripts in this repository alexhyett/useful-scripts. This is my personal ForgeJo server, but I will also be mirroring it to Codeberg: alexhyett/useful-scripts in case you want to raise an issue with any of the scripts.
To accompany this, I am going to create a note for each script on my website with the tag #script that explains a bit more about what the script is doing.
Here is an idea of some scripts I will be sharing:
- Mount/unmount shares from my NAS when the server is online/offline
- Move/Copy files to my NAS only when the folder is mounted
- Send a message to slack
- Download photos from iCloud
- Sort photos into folders based on the year and month they were taken
- Merge pending PRs on a schedule
- Run Start/Stop/Up on all docker-compose files in nested folders
- Copy notes from Obsidian to my website and translate links
Are there any scripts that you use every day that would be worth sharing?
❤️ Picks of the Week #
📚 Books — I mapped HN's favorite books with GPT-4o — I am always looking for book recommendations. This is quite a cool way to look at HackerNews book recommendations. I wish he had this as a normal list as well. Although I may just need to parse the JSON response instead to get all the books.
📝 Article — Things to know about the Great Wave — This is one of my favourite paintings, but there is a lot I didn't know about it. I found it particularly interesting that of course the Japanese would have looked at this painting from right to left, and therefore you notice the boats first followed by the wave.
📝 Article — alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv — This is cool. It is like HackerNews but for research papers.
📝 Article — FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022) — Whenever I have to use someone else's computer or connect to my work VPN I am always shocked by the number of adverts on websites. I really don't know how anyone can use the internet without an ad blocker. As the FBI points out, it just isn't safe to use without one.
🛠️ Tool — Reclaim the Stack — It seems more people are trying to break away from cloud hosting platforms. I mentioned Dokku and Coolify last week and this is another option for those using Kubernetes.
📝 Article — Making progress on side projects with content-driven development — Similar to theme of this week's issue. I have a list of projects I have been meaning to finish or even start. Maybe I should write about them more.
📝 Article — Hacking misconfigured AWS S3 buckets: A complete guide — If you are using AWS S3 buckets you might want to check for these vulnerabilities.
🛠️ Tool — Transparenttextures.com — If you need textures of a particular colour for something this is quite a neat way to get them.
❔ Project — Carpentopod: A Walking Table Project — Slightly creepy but very cool. If you are not interested in the process just watch this to see what I mean.
📝 Article — What you can get out of a high-quality font — I never knew fonts had so many options. I am going to have to look at the fonts I use in my projects to see if they have any of these features.
📝 Article — We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the admins of .mobi — Quite a long read, but it is interesting to see what they managed to do, or at least could have done.
📝 Article — David Chang on the long, hard, stupid way — I can relate to this post a lot. I am not against using AI but when it comes to my writing I always do it the “long, hard, stupid way”.
In a world where 600 words are one click of a button and a prompt away, writing a blog post — in 2024 at that! — sounds pretty stupid
When everyone else is using AI to generate content, there is no better time to be yourself. “Zig when others Zag”.
🛠️ Tool — Konty | Sketch your app ideas without stress — This looks like a great way to create wireframes. For those wondering why you would want the sketched look, try showing a polished wireframe to a client and watch while the meeting gets derailed by styling comments.
📝 Article — Reasons I still love the fish shell — I have been using Oh My ZSH for a while now, but I have never loved it. Maybe I should try the fish shell instead.
👨💻 Latest from me #
I have been looking at different ways that I can monetise this newsletter to make it more sustainable. I am not looking to get rich, but it would be nice if I could at least cover the cost of sending out this newsletter each week.
With 2,400 subscribers, it only costs $29 / month to send this newsletter. This however is going to keep increasing as I gain more subscribers. At some point I could be spending hundreds a month to send this out!
Don't worry I am not going to put it behind a paywall, add adverts or corporate sponsors. Keeping this newsletter free from all of that does however mean I have to rely on the generosity of others.
To make my support options a little more obvious I have added an optional paid plan to this newsletter. Buttondown doesn't charge fees for integrating Stripe, so this support option actually works out cheaper than Ko-Fi which takes 5% for memberships.
There are 3 plans to choose from:
If you want to use PayPal instead or support me with a different amount I still have Ko-Fi available for this.
As a thank you for my supporters I will also add your name and a link to your website to my supporters page. You can also see who I support with my own money as well.
💬 Quote of the Week #
The next time you catch yourself being average when you feel like quitting, realize that you have only two good choices: Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.
From The Dip by Seth Godin.
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