Notes

ARM Support

November 29, 2021

I recently got a new 2021 Apple Macbook Pro 14” with the M1 Pro processor (quite a nice upgrade from my previous 2014 Macbook Pro). While the fact that the new ports on the 2021 Macbook Pro are great, the biggest hangup was switching from an AMD64 to an ARM64 CPU. For my development workflow, this meant switching to ARM64 versions of developer tools or switching to entirely different tools altogether. Following is an abridged list of dev tools that I use and what I switched to on ARM64.

AMD64 tool	New tool
Python	Works great
Node	Works great
Go	Works great
Desktop apps (Chrome, iTerm, Slack, etc)	No issues found
Factorio	Works great
Virtualbox	UTM
Docker	Works great
Phantomjs	Chromium
Official MySQL Docker Image	Semi-Official MySQL Docker Image
Hadolint	No alternative so far
Syncthing	Works great
MenuMeters	Works great
Amphetamine	Works great

So far with few minor hickups, transitioning from AMD64 to ARM64 is working pretty well. Even transitioning off Virtualbox to a different Virtual Machine (UTM/QEMU) platform seemed pretty flawless.

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Map Caps Lock to Escape for Vim

November 24, 2021

As an avid vim user (better than emacs!), I’m having to escape out of different modes pretty often. Hitting the escape button on most keyboards adds a lot of friction being pretty far away from home row on a keyboard (not to mention simply missing on some versions of Macbooks). I’ve therefore remapped caps lock to escape to make it much easier to work with Vim.

For a mac, this is pretty easy and is built directly into MacOS. Within System Preferences -> Keyboard, you can edit Modifier Keys and remap Caps Lock to Escape.

Modifier Keys

Update 2021-11-25 from the @hrs:

DID YOU KNOW that it’s also possible to bind caps lock to both escape (when pressed individually) AND control (when chording)? I’ve been doing that forever and it’s quite nice. The free MacOS tool for that is Karabiner

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Download and Convert Youtube Playlists to MP3 Files

July 15, 2021

These are two scripts to download a youtube playlist of videos, and convert the videos into MP3 files.

youtube-dl supports converting files automatically but requires ffmpeg to be installed on the machine and visible in $PATH. convert.sh instead uses a ffmpeg docker container.

download.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Download a youtube playlist

set -euo pipefail
IFS=$'\n\t'

url="$1"

wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/2021.06.06/youtube-dl-2021.06.06.tar.gz
tar xvf youtube-dl*

screen python3 youtube-dl/youtube-dl "$url"

convert.sh

#!/bin/bash

# This script converts an mp4 into an mp3
# It works by running ffmpeg in a docker container

set -euo pipefail
IFS=$'\n'

convert () {
    input="$1"
    output="$input.mp3"

    docker run -v "$(pwd):$(pwd)" -w "$(pwd)" jrottenberg/ffmpeg:3.4-scratch \
        -stats \
        -i "./$input" -vn \
        -acodec libmp3lame -ac 2 -qscale:a 4 -ar 48000 \
        "./$output"
}

if [ -z "${1-}" ]; then
    for f in $(find . -type f -name "*.mp4"); do
        convert "$f"
    done
else
    convert "$1"
fi

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Nobody Ever Got Fired for Copying FAANG

June 27, 2021

There’s a famous saying “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. This once referred to IBM being a huge ubiquitous company that was a safe choice for being a technology vendor. Nowadays, though IBM is still a pretty large company (#42 on the Fortune 500), it’s outshined by newer larger tech companies like Facebook (#34), Apple (#3), Amazon (#2), Netflix (#115), and Google (#9). These FAANG companies share similar culture and technology and are frequently copied by other companies on things like interview process, internal tools, UX design, and compensation. I therefore propose that the 2020 version of this saying is “Nobody ever got fired for copying FAANG.”

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Removing Token Authentication From Jupyter/iPython Notebooks

May 31, 2021

Jupyter (formerly iPython) notebooks by default require an authentication token to access. This is because the notebooks allow users to run arbitrary code so the token prevents access by non-authorized users. However, with a properly secured environment (running within a local network or not binding to a public network interface), there’s little need to set an authentication token. While the Jupyter documentation recommends using a password instead, it still doesn’t get around the fact that the default notebook configuration uses unencrypted http connections which allow any party to intercept or modify requests, making both tokens and passwords trivial to bypass. Therefore, to fully get rid of authentication on a Jupyter notebook:

Make sure your notebook is not accessible to the wider internet.
Run jupyter notebook --generate-config
Uncomment the line c.NotebookApp.token = '' and make sure the value is set to an empty string
Restart your notebook server

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