karlrwjohnson

I've started to evaluate Ubuntu 24.04 as an alternative operating system for my in-laws as I'm not looking forward to Microsoft's forced upgrade to Windows 11.

Apparently since the last time I used Ubuntu as a daily driver, they've decided to force minimum password requirements... which is appropriate for a website, mobile device, or enterprise systme, but hardly makes sense for a desktop that will never leave the house!

It would be nice if they built an escape hatch like "yeah, I know this is a bad idea, but I know more than you do about this particular situation, so let me set the password to "12345" and let me get on with my life"

The StackOverflow thread about this wasn't totally enough for the newer version of Ubuntu. When I commented out the pam_pwquality.so line, I started getting this error:

Current password: <silently type current password>

This script generates a Typescript typedef file for Loki's configuration file.

I've also included the output of the script at time of writing. If major changes are made to Loki, the typedefs will fall out of date.

If you use Typescript to generate the Loki configuration (notably, all JSON is also YAML, so you can JSON.stringify a Typescript object), this file would be useful.

I haven't bothered putting this in a repo because I'd also feel the need to generate a pipeline to regenerate the file to keep it up to date, and re-publish it as an NPM package.

Currently Ubuntu ships with Postgres 12. At time of writing, Postgres 15 is available.
If you follow the Ubuntu instructions, APT will log a message that "apt-key is deprecated" every time you check for updates.

This is how to do it right.

Based on information here:

When converting a Node CommonJS module to an ES module, __dirname stops working.

Add this line to make it work again:

import { dirname } from 'node:path';
import { fileURLToPath } from 'node:url';

const __dirname = dirname(fileURLToPath(import.meta.url));

Configuring Microk8s for remote access

In order to learn about Kubernetes, I've installed Microk8s on Ubuntu Server on an old laptop stashed in my basement. It seemed like a better option than Minikube because Microk8s actually claims to have auto-update. (I really want auto-update because I'm a developer - not ops. I set things up, but I'm bad at maintaining them day over day.)

I got it installed okay, but I ran into trouble connecting to it remotely. In my opinion, the documentation for doing this is SUPER CONFUSING for beginners.

Web Development without Toolchains

Yelling at clouds

When I first started playing with web development, I was building toy websites with Microsoft FrontPage and ogling over the cool features on Dynamic Drive. It seemed like files were written by hand in text editors and published directly by copying them to FTP sites.

(Later I found out about PHP and server-rendered sites.)

	/*
	GraphQL schema file splitter

	Not guaranteed to work 100% of the time -- I just needed it to work once, for me, in my project
	But I'm saving it in case I need it again

	Basic idea is that I started a project with a rather loose policy toward file organization.
	Every file had multiple "things" in it.

	But I wanted to split it up along the lines of "one file per thing".

	#!/usr/bin/python3
	##
	## PDF Bookmark Patcher script
	##
	## This script allows you to use a regular text editor to edit the bookmarks
	## in a PDF file. It is a wrapper around another tool called PDFtk-java.
	##
	## Usage:
	## 1. < replace somefile.pdf with the name of your file >
	## 2. python3 ../extract_bookmarks.py somefile.pdf --export-text bookmarks.txt

	"""
	Solution finder for puzzle in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess to obtain the Master Sword.

	The temple is guarded by a pair of golems. When the player approaches, the ground transforms into a grid of squares.
	As the player moves around the board, the golems move in response. The player must maneuver the two golems onto
	two specific squares in order to proceed.

	This Python script finds a solution in 801 iterations on a breadth-first search of all possible movements.
	For some reason, I've annotated how it all works.

	import {Dispatch, SetStateAction, useCallback, useLayoutEffect, useRef, useState} from "react";

	/**
	* Object that stores immutable data,
	* allows components to subscribe to changes in that data,
	* and exposes functions to update the state by mapping the previous state to a new state
	*
	* Similar to Redux, except instead of dispatching actions which are consumed by a reducer,
	* it's like you dispatch the reducer functions themselves.
	*