I first started using Ableton Live on a MacBook Pro (erm, issued by my employer), and it was amazing. The amount of sound you could get with such minimal CPU usage blew my mind. When I had to give up the MBP, I shopped around for a new personal laptop. I couldn’t justify $2500 for […]
Category Archives: Technology
Fedora/Windows 10 dual-boot on Dell Inspiron
I recently acquired a Dell Inspiron 15 7000 2-in-1 Black Edition (model number I7586-7205BLK-PUS), which came with Windows 10 preloaded. I wanted to keep a Windows partition active so I can run Ableton Live, but I wanted to use Fedora Linux as my daily driver.
Building a progressive web app with Vue.js and OnsenUI
Recently, we have been doing some proof of concept work on a PWA for our web site. The immediate goal is to make our mobile experience faster, but looking toward the future, we could potentially invest in this technology as a replacement for our current mobile apps if PWAs continue to receive more support on […]
Upgrading instance class on Aurora cluster with terraform
We recently decided we want to upgrade one of our Aurora RDS clusters from db.r3.large to db.r4.large. Our entire environment is managed by Terraform. It was not clear from Terraform documentation what would happen if we just changed the instance size and applied the changes. Would Terraform be smart enough to upgrade the writer instance […]
qooxdoo “chips” UI component
If you’ve ever used a tagging interface in a web application, you’re probably familiar with the “chip” interface. Examples abound (AngularJS Material, Materialize, and the tags on StackOverflow, to name a few). We wanted to use chips in a qooxdoo application, so we had to roll our own component.
Apache, PHP, and environment variables
Environment variables in Apache/PHP can be tricky, especially when PHP code running in mod_php calls a command-line PHP script.
AWS Adventures, part 5 – monitoring infrastructure
I’m addicted to performance metrics on my server infrastructure. For years in our on-prem environment, we monitored thousands of data points using ganglia, nagios, and zabbix. In our new AWS infrastructure, we thought we’d look for some more sophisticated options.
Zonestar P802QR2 3D Printer impressions
2017 was the year I finally broke down and bought a 3D printer. I went for the cheapest model I could find that looked like it was halfway decent. I ended up ordering a Zonestar P802QR2 printer kit (a Prusa i3 clone). Here are my impressions.
Control-arrow CLI navigation in iTerm2
Every time I set up a new Mac, I always forget how to make control-left and control-right work in remote Linux shells opened via iTerm2. If you don’t care about the built-in Mission Control shortcuts “Move left a space” and “Move right a space”, here’s how you do it. These instructions are for Sierra (10.12).
What’s on my MBP
I just upgraded to a new MBP, and here are the packages I immediately installed: