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Jacob Salmela

Git Rebase Is The Pikmin Of Source Control

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

Dynamic Profile And Badge Switching Without Shell Integrations In iTerm2

I use iTerm2 [https://www.patreon.com/gnachman] for all my terminal work. One very nice feature it has is dynamic profiles [https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-automatic-profile-switching.html]. But I usually don’t want to install shell integrations on every server. Instead, I use my dotfiles and an SSH config

How To Create A Custom, Dynamic Inventory Script for 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

Spacewalk--Containerized And Running In Kubernetes

kubernetes Featured

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

Tame Your Patreon Shipping Problem With 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 [https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/05/patreon-buys-kit-to-help-sell-merch/]. Apparently, this is

Fully Automated: DeployStudio Dual Boot

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 [https://jacobsalmela.com/how-to-image-a-computer-with-windows-10-using-dism/]. And

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

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

Run PJL Commands From A Shell Script

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 numbe [https://jacobsalmela.com/2015/02/05/change-the-serial-number-on-hp-printers-using-printer-job-language-and-netcat-ftp/] r, and changing the LCD display

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

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 [https://jacobsalmela.com/tag/dropbox/]. And since I’m stingy,

Roll-your-own Anonymizing Email Server

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;DR * Create a unique email address that forwards to your real email for

Customize WinPE With Wallpaper and Custom Startup Script

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 Structure On your Windows 10 machine, make sure

Celebrate 50 Years Of Star Trek With These Nerdy Computer Tricks

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 [https://jacobsalmela.com/tag/star-trek/]. Here are a few of my favorites. Turn Your Mac’s Wallpaper Into An LCARS Terminal (Complete With

Merge PDFs Natively With A Right-Click In OS X

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

Ad-free Olympics Using Pi-hole

Ad-free Olympics Using Pi-hole

Sick of ads when trying to enjoy the Olympics? Not me. I have been blocking them since day one! Pi-hole ad blocker works differently than others because it is a DNS-based ad blocker. This means ads are blocked before they are downloaded so you can even block ads in apps

Batch Download All Of GarageBand's Loops, Jingles, And Sound Effects

GarageBand has a lot of cool loops and sound effects. If you are a systems administrator, you might be tasked with deploying these sounds and loops so you don’t need to download it onto each computer when GarageBand opens up. Or maybe you just want to have these effects

FAA GPS Outages Are Actually A Conspiracy To Make An App Store Logo On The Ground

The featured image of this article is an aerial view of the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake (Wikipedia) with and overlay of the logo of the app store to prove this crazy theory. Apparently, the US military will be testing a device or devices that will potentially jam GPS

I Made My Own Script To Fill Out Tedious PDF Forms For Me

I Made My Own Script To Fill Out Tedious PDF Forms For Me

I often need to fill out a PDF form for requesting medical records. I have typically done this using Preview since I can use it to digitally sign the form [https://jacobsalmela.com/os-x-sign-pdf-documents-using-real-signature-using-preview/]. But requesting new records after every appointment started becoming tedious–even when doing it digitally. I

Use Wired Ethernet On Your iPad or iPhone

Use Wired Ethernet On Your iPad or iPhone

iPads and iPhones do not have an Ethernet port, but there are cases where you might want to use a hardwired connection. You can actually run your iOS device over Ethernet with some adapters. This is useful for quickly downloading large iOS updates or if your wireless is slow or

Windows 10 Is Bourne Again With A Linux Shell

Windows 10 Is Bourne Again With A Linux Shell

Yup, Windows 10 is getting a bash shell [http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/30/11331014/microsoft-windows-linux-ubuntu-bash] ! I have always loathed doing anything in Windows because it was difficult to script [https://jacobsalmela.com/tag/scripting/]/automate [https://jacobsalmela.com/tag/automation/] anything. And Window’s Command Prompt was a

windows Featured

How To Image A Computer With Windows 10 Using dism

If you want to image a lot of computers with a clean Windows 10 image, Microsoft has lots of built-in tools to help do this, but it’s easy to get lost and overwhelmed with their documentation. To alleviate that headache, I will explain step-by-step how to: * create and use

Automatically Change .om to .com To Prevent Malware

Automatically Change .om to .com To Prevent Malware

Malcontents are sneaky. In their latest ploy, they are counting on you misspelling “.com” [https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/type-a-url-wrong-and-you-might-end-up-with-malware-on-your-mac/] so they can send you to one of their fake domains. So instead of going to netflix.com, you end up at netflix.om–a phony site determined to infect

Convert DOCX to PDF Natively With A Right-Click

Convert DOCX to PDF Natively With A Right-Click

Microsoft Office for OS X is usually very sluggish and slow. This is one reason I don’t like working with DOCs or DOCXs in OS X. Yes, you can easily view the document using QuickLook (pressing the Space bar while the file is highlighted), but if you actually want

Prevent Ransomware By Automatically Finding The Checksum Of Downloaded Files

Prevent Ransomware By Automatically Finding The Checksum Of Downloaded Files

Apple has already shut down the ransomware [http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/07/apple-has-shut-down-the-first-fully-functional-mac-os-x-ransomware/?ncid=rss] found in the Transmission torrent client. You can easily prevent this from happening to you in the future by adding a Hazel rule to your downloads folder, which will automatically determine the checksum, so

C.H.I.P. and Pi-hole Gets You Network-wide Ad Blocking for $9

It’s already easy to block ads network-wide with the Pi-hole [https://jacobsalmela.com/block-millions-ads-network-wide-with-a-raspberry-pi-hole-2-0/] on a Raspberry Pi, but now you can do it for even less money by running it on a C.H.I.P. microcomputer [https://jacobsalmela.com/how-to-set-up-a-headless-and-password-less-c-h-i-p-computer/], which you can buy for $9. There

Pi-hole: Reaching Critical Mass

The Pi-hole project has been growing steadily for quite some time now and is been becoming difficult to manage. I usually spend a few hours a night after my full-time job fielding questions and reviewing pull requests. Lately, it has been mostly responding to people instead of writing code, because