A little while ago I finally got around to bringing order to the mess called my photo library. They were scattered across multiple machines, disks and SD cards. First thing’s first - I moved all files to one place so it’s easier to work with. In retrospect, I’m glad I did this clean up on my nVME disk - this saved me quite a bit of time. DISCLAIMER Some of the tools discussed here can delete/overwrite files you didn't intend when used incorrectly.

Recently I was cleaning out my GMail mailbox. Yes, yes I know they give you lots of space and you can even buy more if you need it, but I kind of wanted to leave fewer old emails hanging around. I don’t know, we’ll call it “spring cleaning”. Though not all old emails are useless, some of them I actually wanted to keep and archive offline. For the most part things went smoothly, I made good use of Google Takeout service by downloading labeled emails as sepparate chunks.

I’ve been playing around with Golang for a few months now and I have to conclude that it is indeed a practical, well thought out language that is also fun to use. If you haven’t heard about or tried it yet, head over to tour.golang.org right now. There you can try the language right inside your browser, hassle free, no installation required. Though there’s something compelling about compiling things on your own machine.

Here’s a really quick tip. If you’re running Windows and are using PuTTY to manage your unix servers, chances are you have a lot of saved sessions i.e. information on how to connect to your server, what font type and size to use, etc. And if you ever tried copying them to another machine you noticed that PuTTY doesn’t have a user-friendly export/import sessions button. But there’s a way to perform a saved sessions export manually.

All modern browsers nowadays have integrated development tools among which there’s a JavaScript console where you can type in some JavaScript and test your ideas, debug your code or see output from your script’s previous events. But the console is capable of so much more. Well, actually IE’s console is somewhat more limited than others, but the rest of them are pretty cool. To get an idea of the possibilities visit the chrome developer tips and tricks page to learn more.

In this tip I want to share with you a quick and easy way of creating your own time lapse videos using your webcam and a tool called FFmpeg. I just recently discovered this command line tool myself and can think of various cool uses for it e.g. connecting a webcam to a Raspberry Pi and leaving it somewhere to take snapshots on certain events, or stream video of some place you want to monitor.

In this post I’ll try to share my recent experience with Velocity template debugging. There are a few ways to debug the templates depending on where you think the problem lies. But at times you have modify templates written by others and that’s when you need to do some exploring like finding out what variables are actually passed to the template. This is not always easily found in code, sometimes it’s simpler to print this stuff out when you’re already in the template.

I was experimenting with WebGL the other day and it’s pretty damn cool. Here’s a spinning 3d logo of the company I currently work for as an attempt at animating something in 3D. If you’re not in the loop, WebGL is a JavasSript API supported by modern browsers that allows interactive 3D graphics rendering in a browser’s window, specifically the canvas tag. The graphics rendering is GPU accelerated which means excellent performance (as long as you’re using it wisely).

It’s been quite a while since my last post so I’ll try to ease back into blogging. For now I’ll just share a little something I created for myself to help with the SSH tunnels that I need to create on a seemingly regular basis. Sometimes I forget or mix up the parameters that need to be passed to SSH client, especially when interconnecting these tunnels. In this simple tool you can enter the missing info to form a logical sentence in English language and when you click the generate button you get a command line for the SSH client.

A couple of months ago I’ve switched from Java development to developing for Mac OS X. Let me tell you, it’s a completely different world, but that was to be expected. The first thing is to get acquainted with the OS and it’s features. That actually didn’t take too long. I’m really pleased with the availability of a full-fledged UNIX console in the OS, so I’m able to leverage all of my linux knowledge.

I haven’t posted in quite a while. Been busy with all the job switching, getting used to Mac things and such. On another topic while cleaning up my hard drive I’m finding various neat stuff, that I forgot about. Will try and share some of it with the rest of you. These are mostly things that you either need or don’t care about at all. One of those things is a screencast that I’ve forgotten I made.

Hi there! Here’s another quick suggestion for all of you out there who have to deal with a lot of web server environments and need to make sure that they’re all alive and responsive. Sure there are all sorts of tools for server monitoring and performance tracking, but I found that most of the time you just need to know if the server is up & running. And of course you should be notified if it’s not.