Tools

About a month ago, I bought a 2022 iPad Pro 11 inch (4th gen) used for about 800 EUR (Which, given they are still for sale on Apple’s site for nearly double that (mine is a 256Gb model with Cellular) I think I got a good deal. I also got my hands on the Keyboard Folio, which is both a good thing, especially for writing stuff like this, but also a bit of a pain (the weight of it adds to the iPad and the fact that you need to remove it from the iPad to use it as a tablet is a pain). I also got my hands on a 2nd Gen Pencil, along with a USB C hub.

In yesterdays post, i mentioned that i wanted to try get an auto deploy working for this site. It already builds auto-magically using Forestry and puts the static HTML into a Github repo, but i needed to manually update the servers hosting the site. Well, not any more!

using the magic of Github’s Web hooks, the Webhook project and a small piece of bash shell script, i have managed to get this auto deploying.

So, as you probably know, this site is built with Jekyll. Jekyll is a Static Site Generator, basically taking an input of a load of text files (see the source repo for this site on Github here) and generating a load more HTML (the static HTML is hosted on Github here, which auto publishes to Azure App Service).

In previous posts, i have talked about using the likes of Visual Studio Code and Mark Down Monster to build the site. Well, a few days back, i found Forestry.io. Its a web application which, in my case, is linked with my GitHub repo (the Jekyll source one) and allows me to make changes to the code easily. Because the way i build my site is a little different, i manually build the site and push to the destination GitHub project, but they have features allowing you to push directly to SFTP or FTP servers, GitHub, or some other options.

A few years back, i created a post showing you how to add an Alias to PowerShell to easily start Sublime Text from a PowerShell command line . This worked well, but this is 2017 (that post is from 2012!) and my daily text editor has changed. I have moved to Visual Studio Code for most of my daily work. It works well 95% of the time. I still use Visual Studio Pro for C# Development, but for quick fixes and work on, say Go or smaller edits, Code is great. For blogging, on the other hand, I am trying out MarkDown Monster but code still has some nice features. We will see how tests go.

See what i did with the title?! Anyway, in my last post, i explained how i was building this site with Docker running on Windows 10 with the Anniversary update. Today, i am going to show you how to host it using Nginx and ngrok.

So, first, you should know what Nginx is at this stage… If not, check out their site. Next ngrok is basically a way of tunneling your localhost to the web. So, how do we build the whole lot together and serve your site to the internet? Well, this is what i have so far:

As some of you probably know (or based on the footer of the site) this site is built with Jekyll. Jekyll is a static web site builder, written in Ruby, and is a bit of a pain to build on Windows. Earlier on this year, I wrote up a post explaining how to use Jekyll on Windows using Bash on Ubuntu on Windows… It was a bit complicated, and, well, worked a few times, but was not too successfull… So, were do we go next? Well, Docker to the rescue!

I have decided to do a post on some of my favourite tools to use for development, administration, etc. It’s kind of like Hanselman’s Ultimate Tools list, but not as popular and about 2 years newer… Anyway, the list is available here, and will be updated over time, much like my Daily Carry and Computers pages. If you are interested, you add links though GitHub by editing the toolslist.yml data file.

Microsoft Build 2016 is on this week, and there were a lot of interesting developments yesterday, but the one that interested me the most is Bash on Ubuntu on Windows. Dustin from Ubuntu has a more details, and Scott Hanselman has posted a technical video about this. This is very interesting, and I CANT WAIT TO GET MY HANDS ON IT! But, I do have some questions, which I thought I would put down in blog format:

HubiC is an online storage site, built by the guys at OVH. They are currently offering 30Gb free (if you use the link above) or if you pay, you get 110Gb (insted of the usual 100Gb) for EUR1 a month, or 10.5TB (yup… TERABYTES!) for EUR5 a month… Thats a crazy amount of storage for a not crazy amount of money!

So, while playing around with different things, I found they have an API, so other than the usual apps to play with (like the Hubic Apps for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, Windows Desktop and OSX, Duplicity for backing up *nix boxes, and a few others) you can build your own…

I have previously posted about CrashPlan as my Backup System. I also, a long time ago, talked about Backing up SQL, MySQL and other stuff on my other blog. Well, CrashPlan is all good, but there are 2 “niggly” bits with it…

• Its not FREE (well, this year i got it Free on Black Friday…) but it is cheap ($120 a year to backup 10 machines to the cloud aint bad.)
• Its NOT FAST! The CrashPlan Datacenters all live in the US, and my servers live in Europe (either Dublin or Germany). So, bandwidth is limited… Getting less than 1Mbit/s most times, but have seen it reach 3… I have 20Mbits/s upload… even half that would be nice…

So, thats where Symform comes in. Symform is a P2P Backup Service, which runs on Windows, Linux and MacOSX. In theory, it should run anywhere that has a Mono runtime since its written in .NET. Anyway, you start with 10Gb of free storage, and you can increese that by one of 2 ways: