Technology

I write about technology as I explore it and make it work for me. I’m a believer that technology should work for our needs so that it enhances our lives rather than it dictating how we should live through it’s demands on us.

I find the consumer culture grotesque and aim to use technology for as long as possible so that I can help to protect the environment as well as my wallet.

I believe we should own and have control over our data and recognise that whilst there are limited regulations and transparency on how our data is collected and used that I need to consider the implications of what I services and technologies I use.

I evangelise for Open Source software and hardware for equity and social justice. Everyone should have the opportunity to use and contribute to good tools and services.

Setting up (local)Host URLs Using dnsmasq

As I explore running Gitlab server and pages in Docker I’ll need some local host urls to use. I could just add rows into my /etc/hosts file for the host domains but I’d prefer a more elegant solution. I’m going to set up local DNS forwarding using dnsmasq so I can host Gitlab and Gitlab pages on my local machine. Gitlab will need 2 host domains, one to route to the main Gitlab UI and the second to route to the published Gitlab pages. Continue reading...

Node Development Environments using Nodeenv

I’m working on a project for Cartoon Network and we are building an API on AWS which will accept some JSON and route to Lambda scripts that interface with a MySQL database. To do this I want to set up some local components for development and I’m starting with NodeJS to create both the API gateway and the Lambda scripts.

I want to contain NodeJS as much as possible and be able to switch versions and manage multiple packages across different projects I might work on. I’m going to do this using Nodeenv a python module to manage different versions of NodeJS.

ANSI UK Keyboard Layout on Kinesis Pro

I have a Kinesis Freestyle Pro but it came with a US layout for the keyboard and I wanted a UK one. The issue I’ve had is that not all the keys of an ISO UK keyboard fit/map on the standard ANSI layout, for example the # and ~ on the ISO sit next to the enter key but there is no key for this on the ANSI layout and I use a UK layout (eg. the £ is on the 3 key in the number row). This means that I can’t access the missing keys when I use a UK keyboard layout on my OS and I don’t want to use a US layout because my laptop keyboard which I often use is UK.

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