Camera, code, coffee

I've decided to get filthy rich by starting my own search engine. I mean, if Google and Microsoft can pull it off, so can I, right? And like any great artist, I started with stealing forking an existing project.

So far, I've been taking the code apart to learn how it works, removing stuff I don't need, and tweaking the overall appearance to my liking. Basically, because I don't know what I'm doing most of the time, I've been pulling an Elon Musk: I'd remove a chunk of code and check if the thing still works. Despite my efforts, the thing does seem to work, so ladies and gentlemen, I give you Gufo.

I'm always fashionably late to the party. So forgive me for being the last to get all excited about Restic. Encryption by default, snapshots, deduplication, support for various storage types—Restic checks all the boxes. Not only that, it is also a supremely easy to use backup tool.

While learning how to use Restic, I took notes for future reference. I'm sharing my trivial findings here on the off-chance that someone might find them useful. The notes cover a simple scenario, where Restic backs up data to an external USB storage device.

Google Translate is great, until it's not. The quality of translation is undeniably impressive, and the apps have some genuinely useful features. But even if you choose to ignore the fact that Google lives off our data, there is a matter of Google Translate not working offline—not on a Linux system, anyway. And even if it could do that, there is still a case to be made for using and supporting an open-source alternative free from the shackles of surveillance capitalism.

Enter Argos Translate, an open-source neural machine translation engine that works offline and is available as a Python library, a command-line tool, a web application, and a desktop utility. Install Argos Translate on your machine, add a simple Bash shell script, and you can instantly translate a text selection from any application. Here is how to do this on Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

I can't code to save my life, but that doesn't stop me from trying. One of my latest creations is a case in point. Since stuff tends to disappear unceremoniously from the Web, I usually save local copies of interesting articles. Up until recently, I used the SingleFile Firefox add-on for that, but the process involved too many manual steps for my liking. After several failed attempts to make Archivebox work, I decided to roll out my own tool based on monolith. The latter a simple command-line utility that saves complete web pages as single HTML files. It took me a few hours to cobble together a crude but usable tool that I named Hako (it means box in Japanese, and it sounds a bit like hacky, which I find somewhat appropriate).

I love Bing's daily photo feature, but I don't use Bing. So I whipped up Tiny Page, a simple landing page written in PHP. The operative word being simple. The PHP script pulls the URL of the current Bing photo and its title out of a JSON file and fetches the current weather conditions from the wttr.in service. A dash of CSS styling helps to make the page look not too terrible. That's all there is to it. Wait, actually, the page also shows whatever link you specify as favorite.