today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 19, 2024

• Jeff Bridgforth ☛ Remembering Hardboiled Web Design

  I enjoyed the read and the creative uses of CSS covered in the second half of the book. I appreciated that Andy spent a lot of time talking about semantic HTML and walked through the new HTML5 elements (2011). I put that knowledge to use right away in several freelance projects I was working on at the time.

  The book inspired me in a lot of ways at a time when I needed the lift. I had recently experienced some career change and was not finding joy in my new position. Reading the book helped to renew my creative vision in my work.

• James G ☛ The what, why, how formula of technical writing

  These three questions allow me to evaluate the extent to which my writing and the writing of others follows through on its stated goals. If a guide answers all three questions above -- whether the guide is product instructions, a coding tutorial, educational material, or reference material -- I feel confident that the content is going to guide a reader in the way I or the author intended.

  Let's explore each of these questions one by one. To walk through these questions, I will reference an example of a tutorial I wrote that explains how to train a keypoint detection model. Keypoint detection is a computer vision task that aims to identify points in an image (i.e. points on a human arm). You don't need to know anything about computer vision to read on.

• Bryce Wray ☛ Using Lightning CSS with Hugo

  The only problem with this coolness for Hugo users like me has been that Lightning CSS appears to be strictly for JavaScript-based projects. Fortunately, after stewing over this for a while, I’ve learned there’s a workaround.

• Pi My Life Up ☛ How to Install MongoDB on Ubuntu

  While MongoDB is available through the official Ubuntu repository, the version provided is often old and missing core features or fixes.

  Luckily, adding the official package repository for MongoDB is a straightforward process. Using this, you know you can get your desired version of Mongo and are always getting the latest available version.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ RSS in HTML

  I have a question: has anyone ever tried to standardize an RSS feed in HTML?

  I can’t find any discussion around it — but I’d love to read more about the idea because it intrigues me.

• University of Toronto ☛ Some interesting metrics you can get from cgroup V2 systems

  In my roundup of what Prometheus exporters we use, I mentioned that we didn't have a way of generating resource usage metrics for systemd services, which in practice means unified cgroups (cgroup v2). This raises the good question of what resource usage and performance metrics are available in cgroup v2 that one might be interested in collecting for systemd services.

• Garrit Franke ☛ Cost per Request

  What if we made "Cost per request" a key metric in our observability strategy, alongside "Requests per second"?

• Barry Hess ☛ HTTPS Traffic Redirection Service?

  I’m wondering if there exists a service that is just for redirecting websites? So I could point my DNS for a domain to the service, and then on the service I define the redirect rules for that domain. I’d pay a few dollars for it.

• Ben Tsai ☛ The power of the input field

  I’ve been playing around with some apps recently which are mashups of sorts. One is a private journaling app called Minders, which uses the form of a social media app—a feed, threading, hashtags, likes. The other is Gibberish, which is “a blogging app that looks and feels like a messaging app.” Both of these try to unlock new behavior by transferring the experience of one task to another domain.

• Marcel Kolaja ☛ What is Scalability Anyway?

  Let’s look at some examples, starting with a single-machine system. This could be a single-box database, an application that only runs on one server, or even a client-side application. There’s an initial spike in marginal cost (when you have to buy the box, start the instance, or launch the container), then a wide range where the marginal cost of doing more work is near-zero. It’s near-zero because the money has been spent already. Finally, there’s a huge spike in costs when the load exceeds what a single box can do - often requiring a complete rethinking of the architecture of the system.

• Pi My Life Up ☛ How to Install Proxmox on the Raspberry Pi

  The version of the Proxmox Virtual Environment that we will be installing in this guide is Proxmox 8. This version of Proxmox has been built for the Bookworm operating system, meaning we can use Proxmox on a Raspberry Pi 5.