macOS has no /etc/hostname, instead you have to use scutil (“Manage system configuration parameters”) to (permanently) change your hostname. There …

Running (e.g.) CentOS 7 on unapproved hardware The official CentOS 7 marketplace AMI incurs no extra fees and usually works …

GNU Make is a fabulous, underrated tool. I use it a lot for documenting my data organization — sort of …

Vagrant quickstart reference: vagrant init → create Vagrantfile file in current directory. vagrant up → start up virtual box based …

CSS resets are, in general, a bad idea. They are designed to ensure that your page looks the same to …

There are a couple of opinions on line-delimited JSON. There’s even an officious but totally [needs citation] Wikipedia article. Pretty …

When case is sensitive, it’s useful to get it right. GitHub CrowdFlower Elasticsearch PostgreSQL MySQL DigitalOcean

Basics of simple parsing. LR: left-to-right, rightmost derivation LL: left-to-right, leftmost derivation LALR: look-ahead left-to-right, rightmost derivation

Freeing up disk space on macOS, particularly caches that usually never get purged. Development packaging caches Ruby ~/.gem contains gem-installed …

GitHub pages are great, but they will only serve files from a branch in your git repository named gh-pages. (I …

Another great Quora questions: What are some lessons learned through playing StarCraft that are useful in real life? The highlight …

ls results setuid bit. Denoted by s (directories) or S (files) in the permissions block of ls results, it only …

Want to default spell checking on in say, LaTeX files, but not other languages? Open a .tex document (to set …

Overheard in the [email protected] mailing list, which usually keeps it pretty technical, but I thought this was a nice comment: …

I really like Go’s full specification of dependencies (e.g., import ("github.com/golang-crypto/ssh")), but I fear linkrot, backward incompatibility, and visibility. Also, …

sax-js: This is @izs’s pure javascript parser. I don’t really like the weird mixture of trying to accommodate Node.js streams, …

Cross-post of a fantastic Quora answer by a guy named Tim Fry. What are some things that cops know, but …

ssh CLI flags: -N Do nothing (except connect) -f Fork to Background -q Suppress any output -v Verbose -p Specify …

Firefox GreaseMonkey: cd ~/Library/'Application Support'/Firefox/Profiles/*/gm_scripts

How to add third-party extensions to Chrome, like from www.chromeextensions.org. $ open ~/Library/Preferences/com.google.Chrome.plist Add a Key at the root level …

I just thought this quote from Geoff Nunberg was fun: It’s like hearing someone warn of grave domestic security threats …

So K-Means++ is just K-means, except instead of choosing initial centroids at random, you choose centroids that are furthest away …

tr is a hard-to-search-for command, but very useful. Convert tsv to csv: cat names.tsv | tr '\t' ','

I don’t know who this is, or what they’re referring to. http://www.flickr.com/photos/white_ribbons/5902656773/ But I kind of like the idea that …

Sum everything that matches *.json: ls -l * | awk '{sum += $5}; END {print sum}'

Just got an Android phone, HTC Evo V. It is a pile of frustrations. Did anybody actually design this thing? …

Apparently (says mislav), semicolons are totally unnecessary except for one case: “When a line starts with parenthesis, prepend a semicolon” …

I’m on this listserve thing called “The Listserve” where it’s like 20K people and each day one person wins the …

Just launched my photography website: GirlsAndTheirHair.com My given name + last name + “photography” is dreadfully saturated on Google: www.google.com/search?q=Christopher+Brown+Photography …

There’s a door here in Harpa that has a doorbell, one of those velcro wireless things. At least, that’s what …

So I’m trying to get postfix to keep everything it gets sent and just store it in a file/database, whatever, …

I look this up probably once every two months: # Add the existing user "chbrown" to the existing group "sudo" …

So CentOS is old and decrepit but if you have to use it and need git, here you go: sudo …

Mountain Lion always complains whenever I use any sort of system executable, ps or sudo or whatever: dyld: DYLD_ environment …

Interesting snippet from a Quora question on envy, by a guy Matthew Manning: You have ZERO idea what their personal …