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.

August 07, 2021