HOW INTERESTING...

Reclaiming Your Attention – Part I: How Our Devices Hijacked Our Focus

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Reclaiming Your Attention – Part II: Taking Back Control of Your Digital Life

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Quickly spin up cloud-based machines with a desktop frontend

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Updating Raspberry Pi OS from Stretch to Bookworm

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Distributing tools with Brew & GitHub Actions - Part I

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Wed, 15 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Distributing tools with Brew & GitHub Actions - Part II

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Wed, 15 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Optimising Dockerfiles

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Dockerfiles and Docker Images explained

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Container technologies have fundamentally transformed the way we package and ship applications. The team behind Docker, were one of the pioneers of the container movement, and also one of the first to provide a standardised and portable environment through its Docker images.

In this article, we’ll explore the relationship between the Dockerfile and the Docker image, investigating how each instruction/command in the Dockerfile contributes to the creation of Docker image layers.

Hugo Blog Stack

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this post, I’ll describe the current stack of this very blog. Not only that, but it’s almost free to do. The only cost I face for is the domain, and I can even help with getting that for the lowest possible price too. If you don’t need a custom domain, the entire stack can be completely free!

Setting up Github comments on your blog with Giscus

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Sat, 03 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Wait, what happened to Utterances?
#

In my previous post, I described how to add a GitHub-based comments system to your blog using Utterances. In all the excitement of a free and open source comments platform for my blog, I forgot to check to see if it was still maintained, and it appears to have recently been mothballed. Utterances still works fine - for now, but it’s best practice to implement maintained dependencies.

Setting up Github comments on your blog with Utterances

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been steadily migrating articles over from my old blogs over the past couple of weeks. It’s been a great excuse to look at some new (at least new to me) blog technologies and techniques. This one I like so much I thought I would share it with you all, and it’s a nice break from the older content I’ve been sifting through. This blog article is about how to use GitHub’s technology on your very own blog or website!

CD Ripping in 2021 like it's 1999

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

QNAP - front your internet facing NAS with Cloudflare

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

QNAP - Add a Let's Encrypt SSL Certificate for HTTPS

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Remove website ads & annoyances with Reader View

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Workaround for "Network Drive Not connected" bug in Windows

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Running multiple Firefox profiles simultaneously on a Mac

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been a big fan of the Firefox browser for a long time now. It’s fast, open source, secure and feature rich. However, one feature still eludes it - being able to run multiple instances simultaneously with differrent profiles. Chrome has long had the feature, which can be conveniently accessed through the profile switcher. As can be seen below, this too is possible with Firefox but Mozilla don’t make make it so easy.

You could be forgiven for wondering why this somewhat niche feature is required. Firstly it’s a good idea to keep your work and personal browsing separate. It can be fairly annoying (and in some cases anxiety inducing) to see adverts relating to work appearing in your downtime which can impact on your work-life balance and ability to disconnect. Similarly, personal browsing habits may lead to distractions at work. Secondly you’ll almost certainly need different browser addons. Work and personal life often requires very different feature-sets from your browser, and too many installed addons can severely impact on your browsers’ performance. It’s a good idea to split them out, and the way you do this is with different profiles. Another reason is website logins - there may be some sites which you have a personal and work account for, and to save you logging in and out as you start or finish work for the day can be somewhat laborious if there’s several.

In this article, we will explore how to create a new profile, and also how to run the default and new profile simultaneously on the same Apple Mac.

Keep your printer healthy with an automated print-job via Raspberry Pi

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Format a USB Stick to EXTx using a Mac or WRT-based router

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Sun, 23 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Horses for courses. Formats for file systems.

Using SSH Key-pairs to Better Secure Connections to Remote Servers - Mac

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Blogging on a better blog on blogger, probably

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Mon, 17 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Why would you even want to do such a thing? Well I will tell you.

Blocking adverts on the web - part one

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Tue, 11 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Who enjoys seeing adverts? Anyone? Didn’t think so. Lets block them.

Emoji Support in Hugo

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Fri, 15 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Emoji can be enabled in a Hugo site in a couple of different of ways.

Rich Content

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Hugo ships with several Built-in Shortcodes for rich content, along with a Privacy Config and a set of Simple Shortcodes that enable static and no-JS versions of various social media embeds. Here’s a couple of examples to get you started.

Using SSH Key-pairs to better secure connections to remote servers - Windows

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Reclaiming space on Linux Machines

howinterestingblog@duck.com (Chris Gillatt) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

About