Jacob Salmela - Jacob Salmela

Hosting Tabletop Game Nights During COVID Complete With Sound Effects

As we approach a year of the virus, I missed having my monthly game nights. I have done a few virtual sessions of Cartographers, in which I used my phone as a camera for the components, and then each participant was able to use their own print-and-play copy of the

udemy

Try My Udemy Course For Free

Feedback on my shell scripting course has been positive so far. I have a college student taking who's new to computer programming, so I think that will serve as a great test of the target audience. I also had a seasoned IT pro take the course and learn a thing

shell-scripts

Udemy Course Open For Real This Time

I published my Udemy course where you can learn shell scripting in three hours yesterday, but some technical troubles meant people could not enroll. If you're interested still, you can use COWSAY_THANKS as your coupon code for a better price as a thank you for reading my blog page.

shell-scripts

Learn Shell Scripting In 3 Hours

UPDATE 3: It's working now. UPDATE 2: Just wait a while if you want to enroll. Udemy support is doing things. UPDATE: Udemy kidney punched me and you may not be able to enroll. I'm working on fixing that now. This won't make you an expert, but I did design

shell-scripts

RFP: Design A Simple But Fun Game That Makes Calls To My API

I have thought about this type of project for a long time and was wondering if anyone out there already has or wants to create a game in Construct 3, which I can collaborate on to make calls to an API that I am developing. I envision a game where

Four Years Later: Running Your Own Anonymous Email System

This post is in reference to a procedure I developed to anonymize your email address, similiar to what Abine offers with their Blur product.I originally thought of this because of all the data breaches that were happening. Those certainly have not waned in recent years. The overall concept was

dropbox

Four Years Later: Symlinks and Dropbox for Backup and Restore

Note: This post is about is a homegrown solution to backups/restores I developed four years ago, not the newly-announced Dropbox Backup. I originally developed this method for four reasons: restoring from backups was never a seamless or pain-free processsettings and preferences I adjusted over time were inevitably lost and

shell-scripts

Coming Soon and Paying Respects

The image is my only clue.

ascii-planets

ASCII Planets: An Open Source Board Game Written In LaTeX

I designed my first board game. Really, I just built off of the fantastic work Topi Turunen did with ASCII Empires. It's essentially a re-theme of that game, but I spent a lot of time writing it in LaTeX so others can contribute and make the game better or potentially

sampo

Introducing Sampo: A Bash API Server For Running Shell Scripts

v1.0 of Sampo is an MVP. Written in bash, it is a shell script API server you can run directly in your terminal or via container on Kubernetes. It's open source and I hope you'll consider contributing. It looks like this if you run it directly in your shell:

Would You Be Interested In A Shell Scripting Course?

I have been writing shell scripts for over a decade now, and I have learned a lot. Would you be interested in a Udemy course on learning shell scripting from the very basics to some advanced features? Please let me know directly or in the comments if you'd be interested.

git

Git Rebase Struggles Conceptualized With Pikmin

If you haven’t already, take a look at my first git rebase / Pikmin blog post about how to learn and use git rebase. That post covers the basics, while this one will conceptualize how to use git rebase when things go bad: conflicts, force pushing, and working with a

git

Git Rebase Is The Pikmin Of Source Control

git isn’t easy to learn, and once you do, the git rebase command seems to invoke fear and confusion in many people. But once you learn how to use it effectively, you’ll wish you had learned it sooner–both for your solo projects and while working on a

hacks

Dynamic Profile And Badge Switching Without Shell Integrations In iTerm2

I use iTerm2 for all my terminal work. One very nice feature it has is dynamic profiles. But I usually don’t want to install shell integrations on every server. Instead, I use my dotfiles and an SSH config to change profiles. While working across different local, development, and production

ansible

How To Create A Custom, Dynamic Inventory Script for Ansible

Writing a dynamic inventory script for Ansible can be useful for more than just getting a list of hosts to run a play against. It can also function as a standalone command line utility for your infrastructure. The first time I wrote one, I had a difficult time finding information

kubernetes

Spacewalk--Containerized And Running In Kubernetes

Spacewalk is a decent open source project for patch management but there is no native support for running it in a container. I’m a fan of Spacewalk and use it daily but it falls short in a few areas–namely, it’s a large monolithic application, which I’m

ansible

Tame Your Patreon Shipping Problem With Ansible

My work on the Pi-hole project led me to a start a Patreon page. Like many creators, I spent a while determining what rewards users would want. But unlike most users, I did not have a problem fulfilling orders. Apparently, this is a big problem: project creators spend more time

windows

Fully Automated: DeployStudio Dual Boot

I was recently tasked with deploying dual-boot Macs to all new staff. Naturally, I wanted this to be as automated as possible so it was repeatable and consistent. I already knew how to use an answer file to fully-automate the Windows side of the deployment. And I also knew how

windows

How To Make An Automagic Windows 10 Boot Camp Install .pkg

I spent a long time trying to automate a dual-boot deployment of macOS and Windows 10. The reason being is that it’s very useful to only buy a single piece of hardware (Apple) and have it run Windows and macOS (and maybe Linux, too). But getting two completely different

netcat

Run PJL Commands From A Shell Script

I love learning obscure and under-utilized things in the tech world; PJL commands fit that bill. You can use PJL commands to get and set printer preferences. This includes getting the page count, setting the serial number, and changing the LCD display message. I was recently tasked with evaluating our

dropbox

Using Dropbox For An Easy Restore Of All Your Computer's Settings

Just to be clear, Dropbox isn’t backup software; it’s a syncing service. If you delete a file and that change is synced, and your file no longer exists. I really love the things you can do with Dropbox. And since I’m stingy, I wanted to use Dropbox

hacks

Roll-your-own Anonymizing Email Server

This post isn’t about a specific security breach, but rather a post to educate you on how to better protect your online identity. The term “anonymize” is used loosely for lack of a better word.TL;DRCreate a unique email address that forwards to your real email for every

windows

Customize WinPE With Wallpaper and Custom Startup Script

WinPE is a useful tool for booting a computer and laying down a new operating system. In this post, I’ll show you how to make WinPE a little more useful by automatically running a custom script at startup. Generate WinPE File StructureOn your Windows 10 machine, make sure the

star trek

Celebrate 50 Years Of Star Trek With These Nerdy Computer Tricks

I’m a huge fan of Star Trek. So much so that many of my blog posts are about doing nerdy Star Trek-related things with your computer. Here are a few of my favorites. Turn Your Mac’s Wallpaper Into An LCARS Terminal (Complete With Sound Effects)Download this System47

automator

Merge PDFs Natively With A Right-Click In OS X

UPDATE 2020-05-23: I removed the Get selected Finder items, which was causing duplicates (see comments). I also updated it with screenshots from macOS Catalina. I updated the post to reflect all these changes. UPDATE: If you installed this script today (2016-08-15), you may need to update it. I added a