Alice Pellerin has opened my eyes with the lovely post: your hex editor should color-code bytes. I don't hexdump very often, but I've installed Hexyl for when I next need to:

With long-running jobs I want my laptop to stay awake until the job finishes: $ time caffeinate script-name-here When the script finishes, caffeinate with finish, and the laptop will eventually go to sleep. * * * I use #reference for commands and knowledge I keep having to look up!

The UI at GitHub limits the size of the gist you can create. The way around this is via the gh command line. For example: $ gh gist create path/to/big.txt- Creating gist big.txt✓ Created secret gist big.txt

Sometimes I want to review a PR by looking at the changes in my editor locally. Once I'm happy, I throw away the changes.  The command sequence to do this is: git checkout maingit merge --squash branch-name-here# <do productive and important review work here>git reset --hard HEADAnd if I forget the --squash, it's git...

I like Northflank PaaS. I restrict what repositories it has access to for building Docker images, and I always forget how to add more repositories. The steps are: Go to the Team page (home page, likely) and select "Integrations". Select "Git" on the left-hand menu, and then "View all" GitHub accounts. Select your GitHub...

The default shell on macOS became zsh a while back, but I'm still learning the basics. I didn't know that zmv exists:autoload -U zmv zmv -nv 'ah Study (<->) 1.0 sec.wav' '$1.wav'This would dry-run (-n) a rename of files that match the pattern on the left. E.g., a file like "ah Study 0083 1.0 sec.wav" becomes...

Coursera’s AI for Medicine specialism includes a nice, short, set of videos that explain standard model evaluation metrics. I found it useful, and made a few notes. Interpreting accuracy in terms of probability If accuracy of a model is P(correct), we can break that down as the sum of joint probabilities. P(correct ∩...

I’ve been reading an annoying book which uses odds ratio (and hazard ratios). As I don’t use these terms much, I have to keep checking my understanding. Odds ratios: it’s the ratio of two odds! The useful and beautiful The Art of Statistics gives a clear example: Non-bacon eaters have a 6 out of 100 chance of bowel...

ripgrep (rg) has long replaced the standard UNIX grep command  for me. My main usage is rg sometext, but there are a few flags I sometimes reach for. Limit matches to specific file types For example:  rg --type csv sometextrg --type log sometextUse --typelist to see the list of supported types. You can add more types...

As buried in the docs, it’s a minus sign on the field name. For example: is:issue -assignee:@me state:open

Our energy supplier has given confusing labels to the different rates they charge at different times of the day. So that I can remember them, they are: Green: “Day rate” — super expensive, avoid. Also called "peak rate" which makes more sense. Light pink: “Off peak” — a standard rate. Sometimes also called "day rate",...

Apple Notes detects certain kinds of expressions and computes a result, formatting the maths along the way. I find it mainly useful, but not always. The disable: Format > Maths Results and select Off. This appears to be a per-Note setting. The particular case I ran into was Notes turning a SQL clause into a formatted...

ChEMBL is a database of drug targets, molecules, and measurements of the activity of the molecules on targets. It has an online interface, but I’m more of a SQL person, and so I download the PostgreSQL or SQLite copies of the data. There is a large and comprehensive schema diagram, supporting descriptions, and an FAQ....

My reminder of my local LLM set up as of May 2025. Ollama  Models are stored in ~/.ollama/models, but it’s easiest to manage with ollama ls and then ollama rm. Example: ollama run gemma3 or ollama run olmo2. Integration with other projects is the main reason I have Ollama installed. Smart cat sc is an LLM shell command...

In the continuing series of “because I always forget so better write it down”. Touchpad controls on a Mac Single click (hold) and move — rotate Command + click (hold) and move — reposition Two finger click (hold) and move up or down — zoom in or out Commands center sele — centre the view on the selected object...