keep it simple
home is where /home is
if you spend any amount of time on this site, you'll get the sense that i am driven by a few key principles that are common in hacker subcultures: a desire to make technology free and accessible. i don't want to be the best or flashiest webdev or system admin, i want to be able to manage them at a competent level for dirt cheap - and ideally so simply that i could even empower someone to do it themselves.
i spend as much time trying to break things as much as trying to build them, so my friends (rightly) get nervous whenever i drop a random link to one of my dev servers, usually unprompted. i do more than just websites, and i don't hang out in alot of really tech-oriented social circles. imagine, then, the sort of reaction i might get when i tell a group chat to "simply run curl -I -L ha.zardo.us
"
so?
honestly? i'm sitting down to pick up this draft a few days later, and alot of the interconnecting stations on that thought train have faded.
so i will go ahead and get to the point: don't forget your toolbox. i've got all sorts of opinions about microsoft1 but i have been nothing short of enthusiastic about the gamechanger that is WSL. why is this important? because it means the three major operating systems - linux, mac, windows - now all provide gnu-like tools almost out-of-the-box.
with a bit of clever bash-fu, it's not hard to craft a single script capable of performing the same task across all three of these platforms. my .zshrc
dotfile can be deployed on linux, mac, WSL2 and is also designed to optimize itself if it detects that it is running on a raspberry pi.
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micro$oft. sorry, i had to type it somewhere. ↩
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here is a github gist showing how to allow zsh to detect if it is running in WSL, and configure itself to work with an X server, if one exists ↩