Computers & Tech posts

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[update]er, not?[/update]

Yay, Facebook Messenger Lite (on Android) has finally got a dark mode. One of the last few apps that hadn’t had it that I use somewhat frequently. I find dark mode to be easier on my eyes in that I can look at it for longer.

Git info alias

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I do a lot of management of work and personal projects with git. I’ve been making shell and gitconfig aliases to make things that I do often quicker or to store logic of things that I won’t remember easily. One recent one that I really like is a git info (or g i) alias that shows status and a number of other bits of information about the repository quickly with one command. I’ve been using it in place of status most of the time.

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Rsync and dealing with “some files vanished” warning

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I use rsync for backups, site deployments, and other purposes where I need to sync two folders. It took a little while to figure out, but has been great for those purposes since. Every once in a while, though, I run into issues with it. Recently, I set up an rsync script to back up most of the files on my entire computer. Since this takes a while and the computer is actively running during the backup, things can change while it is still running. This can lead to some errors like “rsync warning: some files vanished before they could be transferred”. Even though this is a warning, and the sync works perfectly fine, it returns a non-zero exit code. This caused my script to stop and thus the rest of the backup activity didn’t finish.

I looked for an option or simple solution to allow it to go on without complaining.

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Swap file for composer out of memory problems

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PHP’s defacto package manager, composer, has long required large amounts of memory to do updates for larger projects, often more than servers or virtual machines have. The script will die with an out of memory error, or more recently, the simple message “Killed”, and do no work in these situations. The normal procedure is to develop locally, deploy local lock file (composer.lock) to the server, and run composer install instead of update. But I’ve recently moved to doing most of my development in VMs, so I have had to work around this problem to get things installed or updated. A swap file is the solution for Linux machines provided in the official docs and expanded in a StackOverflow answer.

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Unprivileged Homebrew install, 2021 edition

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On my new MacBook, I’ve been isolating responsibilities into separate user accounts. This includes an unprivileged “manager” account for installing most global third-party software, and a few development accounts for different purposes. I use Homebrew to install some dev related software, but my old Homebrew setup didn’t work with this conceptually, nor with the more locked down privileges of newer Mac OS versions. I didn’t want to give Homebrew or its packages admin or root privileges, so I have adapted Homebrew’s untar anywhere method to install a globally available Homebrew using the unprivileged manager account, only requiring a privileged account briefly. I’ve also used untar anywhere for a per-account Homebrew install to allow each dev account to have custom versions of any desired packages, with no privileged account required.

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Firefox: Weird rendering with high contrast mode

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I figured out why Firefox 91+ seemed to break some CSS rendering for me (as I blogged about a few weeks back): high contrast mode. I’ve used the accessibility setting “Increase Contrast” on Mac OS for some time to make it easier to see some interface elements. Apparently, via Firefox 91 release notes, “Firefox now automatically enables High Contrast Mode when ‘Increase Contrast’ is checked on MacOS”.

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