ariejan de vroom

Tmux and Vim: Copy and Paste on macOS Sierra

22 March 2017 — As a developer, more than anything, you copy and paste things. Making copy and paste work in properly with Vim and Tmux is, unfortunately, not trivial.

Image Zoom with plain JavaScript and CSS

20 March 2017 — I'm a back-end developer and rarely dabble in the fine art of writing JavaScript. This site still uses jQuery for handling image zooming. No more!

Bitcoin Mining Anno 2017

8 March 2017 — Bitcoin is still going strong since its introduction in 2008. Mining Bitcoin has become increasingly difficult, so how does one mine BTC in 2017?

Marantz PM80 Mk2 Repair Log

9 October 2016 — The venerable Marantz PM80 Mk2. This unit was completely dead, but I was able to bring it back to life!

Squash git commits when merging

17 August 2016 — Got a branch where you tried lots of different things to fix that nagging bug, but want to clean up your git history when merging?

Music Streaming Setup

24 April 2016 — I love listening to music. Although I prefer the off-line, analog way of listening to vinyl records, I also a small-ish CD collection I'd like to use on the go.

Hanami and Multi-Database Testing with Travis

15 April 2016 — Hanami: good! Travis: good! Testing your code against multiple databases: priceless!

Denon PMA 720a Repair Log

10 April 2016 — A classic 1989 Denon PMA 720a Integrated Amp that made a bang and wont't turn on. Let's solve this!

Marantz SR5200 Repair Log

21 January 2016 — A Marantz SR5200 receiver with a non-working front-right channel. Let's fix that!

Denon PMA-560 Repair Log - Update

12 January 2016 — Replacement parts for the Denon PMA-560 have arrived. Let's get to work!

Denon PMA-560 Repair Log

7 January 2016 — Log of diagnosing and repairing a Denon PMA560 Stereo integrated amplifier.

Putting ariejan.net on a diet: a 69% reduction

6 January 2016 — Websites are getting bigger and fatter, let's put ariejan.net on a diet.

El Capitan: Safari New Tab Slow Fix

4 December 2015 — Safari is a decent browser. But recently I noticed a 3-5 second lag when opening a new tab, so I investigated.

Rails generate model: be specific

27 November 2015 — Rails offers some very useful generators, one of which creates new model, including migrations. But did you know you can get into the specifics right from the command line?

Building Golang CLI Tools Update

12 October 2015 — After my previous post on using a `Makefile` to set version and build info I got some valuable feedback from other Gophers. Here's an update.

A makefile for Golang CLI tools

3 October 2015 — Golang is very useful for creating command line interfaces. It does get complicated when you also want to set variables at compile time. I've made a Makefile for that.

Postgresq error: type 'hstore' does not exist

5 August 2015 — When importing a postgres dump into a clean database I got an error about type 'hstore' not existing. This is how your fix that.

Testing with MiniTest

7 April 2015 — Minitest is a small and fast test framework that works delightfully well with Ruby on Rails.

VoltMeister 100: Bench Power Supply - Part 2

26 November 2014 — In Part 1 of this series I discussed how an ATX power supply can be usedto create a poor man's bench power supply. In Part 2 I'll show you howI managed to fit the ATX power supply, my control board and everythingelse neatly into a single box.

VoltMeister 100: Bench Power Supply - Part 1

24 November 2014 — A bench power supply is one of the essential tools of any electronics hobbyist.Although you can buy a such a unit for less that € 50, it's way more fun to build one yourself.

Why I dropped fish in favour of Zsh

20 November 2014 — Developers are religious about two things: their editor and their shell. Many will say fish is the best there is, but after a few months of fish, I'm back to Zsh.

Rails: Prevent Accidental Debugging Commits

15 October 2014 — Figuring out complex app behaviour in development often requires you to pull some tricks. It would be very awkward if those changes found their way into production unintentionally.

Synchronize goroutines in your tests

29 August 2014 — In most cases testing channels is not necessary. You can easily wrap the functionalityunder test in a function and test that. Sometimes, however, you really need to validatethat those channels behave the way you want.

GPG Sign Your Git Commits

4 June 2014 — The relevance and need for trust in the realm of email, using GPG, has been talked about a lot latetly. But how about trust when itcomes to the code your write? Would it be possible to sign your commitswith GPG to generate trust?

Testing $HOME with Cucumber and Aruba

15 April 2014 — Cucumber and Aruba make it awesome to write acceptance tests for your command line programs. But how do you test your program interacting withfiles from a user's $HOME directory?

Dealing With Technical Debt

4 April 2014 — Technical debt is not a new phenomenon. I'm working on a Rails projectwhere there's plenty of technical debt to get in the way. Here's howthe team deals with it.

Pretty Difficult Privacy

3 April 2014 — I have been mildly interested in digital security and privacy for years. With the introduction of Keybase.io that interest gotsparked again and I investigated the current state of GnuPG.

To Blog or Not To Blog

3 April 2014 — My last post was 154 days ago. That's about five months and no posts in the year 2014. I have been wondering why I haven't written any postslately and this is what I discovered.

Deploying with git-deploy

31 October 2013 — I've blogged before about deploying Rails applications. Normally I opt for using capistrano, but it turns out git-deploy is a light-weight, but worthy alternative.

Divide and Conquer

23 May 2013 — Getting up early and getting things done is one thing. As itturns out, there is something more to it: divide and conquer.

Early Birds

21 May 2013 — From begin a lazy nerd to an early riser. This is how I broke my sleeping habit to get things done in the early morning.

I'm here for an argument

26 March 2013 — Asking for something is not easy, especially if the other party does not want to give it. I've learned thatthere's a lot I could change about the way I ask people things.

Automated nanoc deployments

25 March 2013 — In my eternal quest to have a nice, fast and fun to use blogging platform for ariejan.net, I've switched over to Nanoc – a static site generator in Ruby.