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Remote companies have to work harder at everything.
The effort goes beyond “remote-friendly”—you need remote culture.
But once you have a remote culture, it’s hard to imagine going back. After nine years of working remotely, the only thing I miss about working in person is seeing people’s messy desks.
Why desks matter
Loneliness is a problem for remote workers—video chats are a terrible substitute for happy hour.
Plus, in person, you get to see people’s desks—it’s fun—it’s how you get to know people.
And I know other people think it’s fun, too: we remoties share our pictures of our workspaces all the time. Everyone should share their workspaces (here’s mine circa 2016).
My desk
This is my messy office as of today. (No cleaning and no judgments 🥹 allowed when sharing your workspace.)
Some things of note in this picture in no particular order:
- The desk and stuff on it
- Ikea Markus chair and Trotten standing desk
- My laptop—Framework 13 AMD
- Vortex Race 3 Keyboard with Cherry MX clear switches
- Logitech ERGO rollerball mouse
- Ugmonk analog – the most straightforward productivity system I’ve found.
- Field notes expedition edition – “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”
- Endless recorder notebook – this notebook is slowly supplanting my Leuchtturm1917.
- Micron 08 pens
- Elgato wave mic arm with a cheapo Amazon Basics microphone. When you spend all day in meetings, it’s important to sound good.
- Nikon D610 with 24–70mm f/2.8 lens for video calls
- The camera sits atop a Manfrotto 244 Variable Friction Magic Arm attached to the desk via Manfrotto super clamp – see how many magic arms you spot on the International Space Station (answer: bunches)
- The small red things in the foreground are USB data blockers—USB adapters with the data lines removed. I usually keep these in my travel bag.
- The white cube is an ODISTAR Desktop Vacuum Cleaner.
- dretec timer, for when I have the will to pomodoro.
- Post-Its®. So many Post-Its.
- On the shelf
- Perplexus maze ball held in place by a third-hand kit for soldering
- My trusty ThinkPad X230
- Lots of old notebooks and thank you cards
- On the top shelf are some posters and essential reminders: “DON’T BECOME BITTER AND JADED” and “DON’T LET ADULTHOOD CORRUPT YOU.”
- My overflowing homelab rack
- Startech 6U wall mount
- Mikrotik hEX RB750Gr3 5-port Ethernet Gigabit Router
- Ubiquiti edgeswitch 16
- Synology DS212—yes, from 2012(!), it’s still kicking thanks to 2×6TB Western Digital Red NAS HDDs.
- Gigabyte mini PC – 16GB RAM, 1TB NVMe, balancing precariously atop the Synology. The PC runs a handful of VMs: PiHole, HomeAssistant, Grafana, and Prometheus.
- 2×Raspberry Pi 3B+s doing not much of anything
- CyberPower CPS1215RMS Rackmount Surge Protector
- $6 clamp work light with a $60 hue bulb bouncing light off a Neewer 43 in. reflector to light my video calls
- On the floor
- Home Depot homer bucket, storing my Weaver arborist throw weight and line which is crucial for my job as an engineering manager.
- A trash can with a lot of dryer sheets
- An old dog bed
None of these are affiliate links since no one would want to be affiliated with this mess.
In 2017, I opted to skip the crowds and the drive and settle for a 94% solar eclipse. I fully regret that decision.
Weather permitting, I’ll be photographing the full solar eclipse from the path of totality next Monday. While I’ve amassed a ton of gear, the main resource I’ve dumped into this project is time—time planning, practicing, and hacking.
After investing all that time, here’s my plan.
Why
I’m never going to produce an eclipse photo comparable to the work of Miloslav Druckmüller—so why bother with photography at all?
Photography is my hobby, and what’s a hobby without a challenge? Sure, the siren song of cool gear is part of it—I do love gear—but it also takes planning, hacking, and editing skills to create a great picture.
I got to spend time rooting around inside libgphoto2, breaking out the soldering iron to jury-rig a custom ESP32-based release cable, and practicing every move I’ll make on eclipse day. For me, this is fun.
Your mileage may vary.
Gear
Here is my gear checklist for this year:
Imaging:
The lens and teleconverter give me an effective focal length of 560mm. The 1.4µm pixel pitch of the A7rIII means I’ll cover 1.7 arc-seconds per pixel at my focal length—right in the sweet spot (below two, above one).
Here’s what a cropped image of the solar disk looks like on this setup:
You can compare this photo to an image taken yesterday by the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft—both show sunspots AR3617 and AR3619. I’m gratified that a picture from my backyard shows the same details as one from outer space.
Other essentials
- M5StickC ESP32-PICO – I’m using this as an intervalometer. I’ve programmed it with the Alpha Fairy firmware and will control it using pyserial. I soldered together a release cable that I’ll use to control the shutter.
- iOptron SkyGuider Pro – This is an tracking mount. It cancels out the motion of the Earth so the sun appears in the same spot in the frame (if I polar align right).
- Thousand Oaks 77mm threaded RF-film solar filter – for use pre-totality. I bought this for the 2017 eclipse. This prevents the sun from destroying my lens and camera.
- Manfrotto XUME 77mm lens adapter – secures the solar filter to my lens via a magnet, letting me pull it off instantly rather than fiddling with unscrewing a filter.
Software
- Planning – PhotoPills helped me plan where to be and where to look.
- Polar alignment – I’ll use SkEye for daytime polar alignment, pointing my tracking mount downwards towards σ-Octantis, which will align my tracker with the motion of the Earth.
- Weather/Clouds – VentuSky shows real-time GOES satellite imagery and lets you browse weather prediction models. SkippySky shows real-time total cloud cover, seeing, and transparency (and also shows the eclipse path). Clear Dark Sky is the classic astronomer’s forecast tool.
My plan
I’m pegging all my images to f/8, ISO 100, and only adjusting shutter speed.
I’ll be bracketing five photos, each three stops of light away from each other (±3EV). I’ll adjust my base shutter speed twice.
Pre-totality, I’ll do 1/100 second shutter speed. This should cover me for full-disk images, right up through Baily’s beads:
- 1/100”
- 1/800”
- 1/13”
- 1/6400”
- 0.6”
After totality, I’ll move the shutter speed to 1/15 of a second. Fast enough to ensure I get at least one clear shot and slow enough to get earthshine if all goes to plan with my polar alignment:
- 1/15”
- 1/125”
- 1/2”
- 1/1000”
- 4”
If it all falls apart? Well. I’ll be in Austin—a great place to while away the time longing for clear skies.
I’ve never been able to trust ~/.bash_history
.
Regardless of my configuration, I was forever searching for that one
gnarly jq
filter that had somehow disappeared. Then, I found a better way.
Over the past eight years, I’ve hoarded ¾ million lines of bash history:
$ wc -l < ~/.muh_history
763075
This accounts for every shell command I’ve run since 2016—all saved
to a 102MB file: ~/.muh_history
.
$ ls -lh ~/.muh_history
-rw------- 1 thcipriani thcipriani 102M Feb 27 21:23 /home/thcipriani/.muh_history
It’s a perfect, searchable archive of my work.
I’ve come to rely on ~/.muh_history
to take notes for me
while I focus on solving problems. I trust this system, because it’s so
simple.
🛟 Simple history via prompt command
To save my history, I exploit the bash PROMPT_COMMAND
variable.
Bash will execute anything you assign to PROMPT_COMMAND
before showing your prompt:
$ export PROMPT_COMMAND='fortune && echo 🥳'
Q: Do you know what the death rate around here is?
A: One per person.
🥳
$
You can use this variable to write the output of
history 1
to a file:
$ export PROMPT_COMMAND='history 1 >> ~/.muh-history.test'
$ fortune
Caution: breathing may be hazardous to your health.
$ cat ~/.muh-history.test
6851 2024-02-25 18:44:30-0700 export PROMPT_COMMAND='history 1 >> ~/.test-history'
6852 2024-02-25 18:44:35-0700 fortune
I started doing this in 20151, but the more metadata I added—bash process ID, current directory, user—the more powerful my history became.
Today, my history file looks like this:
$ tail -1 ~/.muh-history
847008 /home/thcipriani thcipriani 2024-02-27T15:52:16-0700 echo 'Weeee!' | figlet | lolcat
Now, I can crawl these bits of metadata to look at my history in interesting ways. For example:
- Trace the history of a single shell session.
- Show commands within a time range.
- Search for commands run in the current directory.
🧐 Problems and tradeoffs of ~/.muh_history
My eternal shell history has been working well for eight years. But every solution has tradeoffs and problems:
- One machine – This works on one machine. If you need history saved across more than one machine, Atuin seems like what you want (though I’ve never tried it).
- Local security – This stores any command you run,
including those with woopsied passwords. The
HISTCONTROL=ignorespace
setting helps—it makeshistory
ignore commands that start with a space. - Bash only – I use the default Linux shell for most
operating systems: bash. Nicer shells can do the same things as
PROMPT_COMMAND
andhistory
(e.g., zsh’spreexec
, fish’sfish_preexec
). - Too simplistic – McFly and Atuin seem like
robust, active alternatives. And both use
PROMPT_COMMAND
under the hood. Maybe I’d start there if I were starting today, but~/.muh_history
pre-dates both projects. - Remote security – It would be Bad™ to install this on a remote machine unless you’re the admin of that machine. Never cross a sysadmin.
⚠️ Flailing at bash’s built-in history
Goals of ~/.muh_history
:
- Eternal – I want the option of keeping history forever.
- History builtin commands – “↑” and
ctrl-r
should work in the default way. - History builtin depth – I want a few weeks of
history available to
ctrl-r
. - Instant startup – Minimize lag when starting new bash sessions.
- No logrotate – Avoid logrotate, systemd timers, and cronjobs to manage history—nothing to troubleshoot or maintain.
And the hacks I’ve seen to juice bash’s built-in
~/.bash_history
fail at least one of these:
HIST(FILE)SIZE=<huge number>
2 – On startup, bash loads aHISTSIZE
amount ofHISTFILE
into memory—this could cause lag during bash startup unless you logrotate regularly. And there’s a risk of losing commands if/when your sessions crash.unset HIST(FILE)SIZE
/HIS(FILE)SIZE=-1
– This should makeHIST(FILE)SIZE
infinite, so the same caveats apply as using a huge number. Plus, this has a history of failing in some instances.HISTFILE=~/.history/$(date -I)
– For the first bash session you start in the morningctrl-r
will give you nothing.PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a && history -r'
– Before showing your prompt, write your in-memory history toHISTFILE
and re-read it into memory. This mixes up the history of different sessions, so hitting “↑” may show history from a different session.
Other pitfalls:
- Write on exit – when you
exit
a session, bash dumpsHISTSIZE
lines of your command history into~/.bash_history
. If your session crashes: all gone. This makesHIST(FILE)SIZE
unappealing to me. - Append vs. overwrite – if your shell initialization
files skip setting
histappend
, bash will overwrite~/.bash_history
rather than append your session history onexit
. - Small defaults – bash stores your 500 most recent
commands in your session history and 500 commands from old sessions in
~/.bash_history
.
I’ve set some sensible defaults and ignored clever ideas. Here are my settings:
# append to history vs. overwrite
shopt -s histappend
# ignore commands starting with space; ignore duplicates
HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:ignorespace
# Up the history in memory: 500 → 10,000
HISTSIZE=10000
# Up the history on disk: 500 → 20,000
HISTFILESIZE=20000
# RFC 3339 format; e.g., 2024-02-27T15:52:16-0700
HISTTIMEFORMAT='%FT%T%z '
When I read the wonderful, shorter version of this article: Andy Teijelo Pérez’s Bash eternal history↩︎
I scraped of GitHub for HISTSIZE=. It’s all over the place. Max: 10,000,000,000,000,000; 25 percentile: 1,000; 75th percentile: 100,000; median: 10,000. I set mine at the median. Works fine.↩︎
The laptop industry is a tragedy.
Meanwhile, Framework built something different—repairable, Linux-ready laptops that respect users. Framework is a rare company worth your support.1
So, this month, I bought their 13.5″, AMD-powered laptop—the Framework 13 AMD.
But I’ve seen mixed reviews from other Linux users. I like the Framework ethos—I hope I like their laptops, too.
🛠️ DIY Hardware and assembly
Framework offers two editions of its laptops:
- Pre-built – Fully assembled, complete with a useless (to me) Windows™ install.
- DIY – Do it yourself (DIY). Some assembly required—BYO-OS.
I opted for the DIY edition—a misnomer, given assembly took five minutes.
- CPU 8-core/16-thread 5.1Gz AMD (AMD Ryzen™ 7 7840U)
- AMD Radeon 780M integrated GPU (works fine with
amdgpu
driver) - Ryzen AI Neural Processing Unit (NPU) (AMD released an xdna driver last week. I have yet to try it.)
- AMD Radeon 780M integrated GPU (works fine with
- 64 GB RAM – DDR5-5600
- 2TB NVMe
- 13.5” (diagonal) matte (🥳) screen
This is a powerful machine.
🏋️ Weight
A notebook that weighs more than a kilo is simply not a good thing
The Framework weighs more than a kilo.
Fully assembled (stickers and all), my new laptop tips the scales at 1,323g.
It’s 100g lighter than my x220 but 100g heavier than my partner’s M2 Macbook Air.
The Framework weighs as much as the 2011 Macbook Air—a sure sign innovation has stopped in this space.
🔌 Ports/dongles
I’m torn.
I can arrange my laptop’s USB, power, and ethernet ports however I want them.
And folks in the Framework community are cooking up new ideas.
But these are dongles. Brilliant dongles, but dongles nonetheless—I have to tote them on my travels and keep track of them all.
Now, I need a little pouch for my adorable dongles.
🪫 Battery life
Folks flagged short battery life as a problem for these machines—especially the Intel version. Is that true for the AMD version?
To test this, I simulated some strenuous web surfing—clicking Wikipedia links faster than is humanly possible.2
Results:
Time to battery empty | Brightness | Delay between page clicks | Avg CPU Percentage | Avg Watts |
---|---|---|---|---|
02:20:21 ❗ | 100% | 0s | 13.8% | 23.4 |
02:55:07 ❗ | 0% | 0s | 13.8% | 19.8 |
12:57:57 😅 | 0% | 10s | 1.1% | 4.1 |
As long as I’m not slamming through every page of Wikipedia, the battery would get me through most work days.
During the workday, I use between 5 and 10 watts.3 While that might not give me 13 hours, it beats my ThinkPad X220’s 1.5-hour battery life.
Linux setup
Linux veterans relayed painful experiences running their OS on older Framework models.
But my experience was (mostly) jank-free.
Ubuntu 22.04
I installed Ubuntu first, since it’s the sole Linux distribution Framework’s website listed as “Stable.”
And Ubuntu 22.04 ran flawlessly.
Chalk this up to the detailed Framework Ubuntu setup guide, with its giant gob of copy-pasta commands—much laudable, painstaking effort has gone into making this experience perfect.
Debian Bookworm
I perused the Debian Wiki’s Framework pages and the Debian Install Guide as references to install Debian Bookworm.
Audio, wifi, bluetooth, touchpad, webcam, and every button worked out of the box.
Then I closed the lid, but nothing happened. Sleep failed.
Problems with s2idle on AMD machines are common. Problems are so common that Freedesktop cobbled together a script with cute emojis to help troubleshoot: amd_s2idle.py.
Framework user forums pointed me to the
firmware-amd-graphics
Debian package bug
1053856.
After firmware fiddling and an hour+ tweaking Xmonad for the high-dpi (2256x1504) display: all’s well.
I hate computers, but this one is pretty good.
What I like:
- Repairable – I hoard a closet of old ThinkPads because I know they’ll end up at the dump otherwise.
- Hardware camera/mic switch + RFKill – Hardware switches beat camera covers any day. And a laptop that respects its users’ privacy is lovely.
- Reference designs – While it’s not open hardware, Framework releases reference designs under a Creative Commons license.
- Matte screen – Why are shiny screens an option? Who wants that?
What I dislike:
- Keyboard – It’s mushy. Plus, the button under
[/?]
is[←]
, which is breaking my brain. I’m used to it being right CTRL (which I use as AltGr). - Brightness – Even at 0% brightness, the screen is too bright. There’s probably something I can do here.
- HDMI requires back slots – HDMI expansion card plugged into the front left expansion slot failed. Moving to one of the back slots works.
- 3:2 aspect ratio – Why? It’s an outre choice. I’m having a bad time mirroring to 16:9 displays. Plus, horizontal screen space is great for tiling window managers.
- Trackpad – I still like buttons. The trackpad is good, but I’m a luddite—ThinkPads spoil you.
- Keyboard backlight – Speaking of ThinkPads, why have we abandoned the ThinkLight?
🏛️ Verdict
In a barren industry where planned obsolescence is the norm, Framework produces nice hardware for a fair price.
The Framework AMD 13 is a powerful, modern laptop capable of running Linux. And all the buttons seem to do what they’re supposed to.
I look forward to the day when I can Ship-of-Theseus the guts of this beast to get an even beefier boxen. It sure beats throwing it on the pile of ThinkPads collecting dust in my closet.
EDIT 2024-01-31T13:53:30-07:00: Before, this article referred to the Framework AMD 13 as the “13th generation.” Commentors pointed out that that was incorrect. The 13th generation Framework laptops refer to the 13th generation of the Intel CPUs, not the Framework hardware.
Man, I hope this comment ages well.↩︎
I scripted the “Getting to Philosophy” Wikipedia game for the top 400 Wikipedia Articles of 2023↩︎
Unless I do something silly like attend a zoom meeting.↩︎
The intention is to keep interesting tools around git here, maybe even experimental ones
Junio C Hamano, git/contrib/README
Git’s source repo includes a “contrib” directory containing tools that extend git.
But these tools are hidden from most users. And they require extra steps to install. So they’re less well-known than they should be.
These are the tools I’ve found useful.
diff-highlight
diff-highlight
makes git diff
easier to
read, making subtle changes stand out.
Git diff-highlight’s author described it as “a simple and stupid script for highlighting differing parts of lines in a unified diff.”
Try it out with:
git log -p --color | /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight
If you like what you see, make it your pager with this oneliner:
git config --global core.pager '/usr/share/doc/git/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight | less'
git-prompt.sh
git-prompt.sh
makes information from git status
accessible at a
glance.
For the basics, it’s easy1:
- Source
git-prompt.sh
from your shell init file. - Add the magic incantation somewhere in your prompt (e.g.,
PS1='\u@\h $(__git_ps1 " (%s)")\$ '
). - Tweak with environment variables until you get a prompt that works for you.
Here’s my config:
GIT_PS1_SHOWUNTRACKEDFILES=1
GIT_PS1_SHOWDIRTYSTATE=1
GIT_PS1_SHOWUPSTREAM="auto verbose"
. ~/bin/git-prompt.sh
PS1='\u@\h $(__git_ps1 " (%s)")\$ '
Inside a repo on main
in a clean worktree, this
shows:
me@💻 (main|u=)$
If you make a big mess, the prompt makes it impossible to miss:
me@💻 (main *+%|u+1-1)$
│ │││ │ │ │
│ │││ │ │ └── count: changes behind upstream (-1)
│ │││ │ └──── count: changes ahead of upstream (+1)
│ │││ └────── indicator: upstream set (u)
│ ││└──────── indicator: untracked file (%)
│ │└───────── indicator: staged, uncommitted change indicator (+)
│ └────────── indicator: unstaged change (*)
└────────────── info: current branch name
A git-aware shell prompt solves a multitude of woes. My prompt has saved me from countless sticky git situations.
subtree
git submodule allows you to include other git repos within your repo. But anyone who’s used it can tell you: it gets confusing fast.
git
subtree eases git submodule
pain.
Both submodule
and subtree
let you add a
library as a subfolder of your project.
But subtree
integrates the history of the library into
your main project. And you can get it back out as a standalone library
later.
This lets you branch and tag a project along with its libraries—a
critical limitation to git submodule
.
For example:
git clone https://github.com/thcipriani/my-parent && cd my-parent
git subtree add --prefix=mylib https://github.com/thcipriani/my-library
Adds my-library
to the my-parent
project in
a folder called mylib
—the two projects’ history gets
merged. From there, it works like a monorepo.
After I’ve made a series of changes inside my-parent
,
including changes to mylib
, I can extract the history of
mylib
with:
git subtree split --prefix=mylib
0b64183b7a0a27ad1f466d5cac61cbfefd1e598e
git push https://github.com/thcipriani/my-library 0b64183b7a0a27ad1f466d5cac61cbfefd1e598e:master
Or, in one step:
git subtree push --prefix=mylib https://github.com/thcipriani/my-library main
More
- git worktree: is an example of a contrib script that’s made the jump to a git built-in command. Maybe, in time, other commands in this list will, too.
- git-jump:
opens your editor to interesting bits of code. For example,
git jump diff
opens vim to the first diff hunk. - mw-to-git: lets you read and edit MediaWiki wikis (like Wikipedia) as if they were a local git repo (cf: maintaining userscripts with git)
- pre-auto-gc-battery: a hook that prevents git’s automatic garbage collection if you’re on a laptop using battery power
And there are even more weird gems to unearth. Take a look!
The script contains detail usage instuctions, too↩︎