today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 20, 2023

• nixCraft ☛ 2023-11-17 [Older] SSH WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE! Error and Solution

• Make Use Of ☛ How to Use ncdu to Check Disk Space in Ubuntu

  Ever found yourself stuck trying to understand the disk space consumption on your Ubuntu system? If so, you’ll want to check out the ncdu command which can help resolve this usage mystery.

  Hеrе’s how to usе ncdu to check disk space usage on Ubuntu and make disk space management a hasslе-frее task.

• Polarhive ☛ jukebox

  I wanted to fetch my LastFM music recommendations using yt-dlp, without needing to open a web-browser. I made a bash script called /jukebox: it lets you play your LastFM music recommendations on GNU/Linux. It fits into the UNIX ecosystem. It does one thing, and does it properly.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Reframing WIT as primarily a machine format

  Earlier this year I wrote about how I believe HTML is too complex to be feasibly written by hand, and rather than linting manually authored HTML for errors it's probably more effective to treat HTML as a target which should be compiled to. I ended up putting these ideas to practice in the html crate for Rust, and I think that ended up being roughly the right idea. At the core of this was a reframing of "HTML" as this thing that's meant to be read and written by humans, to a format that is primarily intended to be produced and ingested by machines.

  Recently I've been using WIT - the IDL format used to define Wasm Components with - and I'm slowly starting to form opinions about it. Yesterday I wrote about why I believe ABIs can be described as: "A type system + object encoding + calling convention". But today I want to take a slightly different perspective on WIT and share an opinion I've started forming: I believe that WIT should primarily be produced and consumed by tools, and not by humans. This is a departure from how people have been reasoning about WIT so far - which is to think of WIT as a human-readable format people will want to read and write by hand. In this post I want to explain why I believe this is probably a better way to reason about WIT.