today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 20, 2023

• TechTarget ☛ Tutorial: How to use Linux Deja Dup to back up and restore files

  Deja Dup isn't advertised as a backup tool, but that doesn't mean you can't use it for data protection. Find out how to use Linux Deja Dup for backup and restore in this tutorial.

• Hunor Márton Borbély ☛ Day 19: How to Add Animation on Hover of an SVG element

  We can also set more traditional animations with CSS. Here we animate the transform property with keyframes. We can even trigger this effect on mouse hover.

• Hunor Márton Borbély ☛ Day 20: How to Animate a Snowing effect with SVG and CSS

  To continue our forest example we can add a snowing effect with a similar animation. We animate transform again, but this time we move many more elements.

  We extend our forest example with simple reusable snowflakes and add a bunch of them to the scene with various CSS classes to set some variation in speed and appearance. Then we add animation in CSS to make them look like snowing. It’s a bit glitchy and not the most sophisticated animation, but you get the idea.

• Chris Hannah ☛ A Better Version of the ls Command

  I was watching various videos recently about various command line tools that could be useful on macOS, and one peaked my interest, a replacement for the ls (list directory contents) command, called exa. It’s still just listing the contents of a directory, but it has a lot of nice-to-have features like better colouring, better visualisation of metadata, knowledge about more file types, and a bunch of options that you can use.

  TL;DR, exa is no longer being maintained. However, a replacement has now risen out of the ashes, and is called eza.

• University of Toronto ☛ Why grub-install can give you an "unknown filesystem" error

  When Grub is booting your system, it doesn't (and can't) use the Linux kernel's filesystem code and device drivers (or any Unix kernel's code; Grub runs in non-Linux environments as well). At the same time, Grub wants to read various things from your filesystems, such as its menu file or your kernel (and on Linux, initramfs). To do this, Grub has its own collection of filesystem code and software disk drivers, generally in a collection of loadable (Grub) modules. When grub-install runs, one of its jobs is to prepare the set of filesystem and disk driver modules Grub will need at boot time. Its report of "unknown filesystem" means that it can't find a filesystem module that will accept the filesystem that you have things on (generally either the root filesystem or your /boot filesystem, depending on whether /boot is on its own filesystem).

• Manuel Matuzović ☛ Boosting testing efficiency: how semantic HTML transforms End-to-End testing

  Semantic and accessible HTML serves as a powerful tool, enhancing not only human interaction but also the efficiency of software systems. For instance, when users fill out forms with clear labels and accessible input fields, this reduces errors and ensures sending accurate data to the backend and databases. You may also have heard about how a well structured web page is fundamental for search engine optimization (SEO).

• 12 Days of Web ☛ View Transitions

  The View Transitions API was proposed in the CSS working group back in 2021 to allow transition animations when navigating between different application views. A lot of work has gone into this, and the specification is now at Candidate Recommendation status.

• James G ☛ Advent of Technical Writing: Holistic Documentation Reviews

  In your day-to-day life as a technical writer, you will make a lot of incremental improvements to documentation. This might involve adding a new guide to a larger documentation site, adding a new section to an existing post, updating the navigation structure for a product, updating screenshots, and more.

  Every so often, I recommend taking a step back from the projects on which you are working to ask: is this documentation, as a whole, achieving its goals?

• Unmitigated Risk ☛ Effortless Certificate Lifecycle Management for S/MIME

  One of the new validation methods introduced permits mail server operators to verify a user’s control over their mailbox. Considering that these services have ownership and control over the email addresses, it seems only logical for them to be able to do domain control verification on behalf of their users since they could bypass any individual domain control challenge anyway. This approach resembles the HTTP-01 validation used in ACME (RFC 8555), where the server effectively ‘stands in’ for the user, just as a website does for its domain.

• Sean Conner ☛ The Gopher Situation, part III, The Search For Uptime

  The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL: [...]

• Dan Langille ☛ Avoiding repetition within jail configurations

  Without resorting to configuration tools, such as Ansible, I wonder if there is an easy way to avoid repeating a list of datasets within a jail configuration.