Mark Phillips

How to fix Starship cross-shell prompt not appearing on macOS

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 15:11:00 +0000

I may have ‘retired’ from being a techie a long time ago, but I haven’t stopped solving little day-to-day problems in a shell 😊 So like any self-respecting nerd, whether old or young, one needs a good prompt. It’s a pity that Starship’s setup on macOS seems to fail out of the box though. Here’s how to fix it.

It is impossible to delete RAW files from iCloud Photos

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 18:49:00 +0000

I decided to try and save some space in my iCloud drive. Looking at the usage, 160gb was being taken up by Photos. I thought that was ridiculous. This turned out to be nowhere near as ridiculous as the ensuing saga to try and delete some files.

CleanShot X screen capture tool

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:50:00 +0000

Taking screenshots on macOS is a doddle. cmd-shift-4, or cmd-shift-3, or for ultimate control, cmd-shift-5. What could be simpler? Why would you want more? That’s what I used to think, until I tried CleanShot. I’ve often found myself wanting to get a screen grab of, say, a browser window, but in a particular ratio. For the last year I’ve been running marketing for a local business. As part of that, I create a lot of content for YouTube.

Default Applications

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 19:17:19 +0000

Jumping on the default apps bandwagon, I thought I’d share how ‘default’ I am (is this the’normcore’ of macOS application use?) 📨 Mail Service: Hey 📮 Mail Client: Hey 📝 Notes: Apple Notes (+ Bear) ✅ To-Do: Things (+ Apple Reminders) 📆 Calendar: Fantastical — fronting Apple iCloud 📆 Calendar bookings: Cal.com 🙍 Contacts: Apple Contacts 🗞️ RSS Client: NetNewsWire ⌨️ Launcher: Spotlight 📸 iPhone photo shooting: Halide ☁️ Cloud storage: iCloud

Should we be polite to AI?

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 12:51:00 +0000

Elaine Moore recently wrote an article in the FT titled “We might be surprised by our reactions to generative AI”. It got me thinking about the way we ‘speak’ to generative AI, like ChatGPT. Like many of the tech community, I’ve been using ChatGPT for most of this year. I’ve found it to be the search engine I wish we’d always had, and a fabulous co-pilot in so many tasks.

Alleviating Zoom fatigue with a teleprompter

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 15:25:00 +0000

After my desk recently featured on Workspaces, its curator, Ryan, mentioned that several people had asked about the teleprompter set up I use for video meetings.

Desiderata

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 10:58:52 +0100

I am of the age that means I was the second year to sit GCSEs (after GCE O-Levels were abandoned). I therefore consider my education to have been relatively poor. That doesn’t mean I’ve spent my life feeling short-changed though. On the contrary, I’ve spent the rest of my life continuously learning. So maybe you’ll forgive me for having only recently discovered Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata poem. Shock! Horror! I know. It feels like it channels the core of stoicism, another rabbit hole I’ve been down in recent years (off the back of discovering mindfulness).

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 09:15:00 +0000

“Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design”. Dieter Rams.

After nearly 30 years of working in tech, I do sometimes despair of the industry tendency to ignore people. Sometimes it feels like we’re making software just for the sake of making it, not recognising that we’re actually trying to solve problems for people. Although I believe most of the indifference is not deliberate, I do think it is pervasive.

A plausible alternative

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Why pay for something that you can get for free?

Does 125 hours of mindfulness work?

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In a word, yes. But the question needs some context.

Apple HomeKit invite fails with apparently no reason

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

What should be simple has this week turned out to be anything but.

Postfix error cannot open file: Permission denied

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been moving email off of Google recently to the excellent service by Hey. But the temporary forwarding solution hit a snag with lots of apparently simple “Permission denied” messages.

8 tips for better video meetings

Sun, 04 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve spent most of the last decade working from home. From 2014 until early 2020 I was working for a US company, where initially I was the only employee in Europe. Inevitably communication was either asynchronous — via Slack — or by video meeting. 2020 has seen a step change in the way we communicate, and we’ve learned a lot about people’s shelving. But mostly, I’m still seeing a lot of scope for improving the way we use video meetings.

5 books, part 5: Into the Woods by John Yorke

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

“Good storytelling never gives you four, it gives you two plus two… Don’t give the audience the answer, give them the pieces and let them conclude the answer”

Have you ever read a Michael Lewis book? Liars Poker, The Big Short, Flash Boys? They’re all books about the finance industry. I’m not sure I can think of a duller subject to write about. However, if you have read any of his books, you’ll know they are riveting reads. Clichéd it may be, but they’re unputdownable. This is because Lewis is a great storyteller.

5 books, part 4: Alchemy by Rory Sutherland

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

“Things are not what they are; they are what we think they are”

My wife is a cryptic crossword fan, and she’s very good at them. I’ll confess, I am hopeless at them. The secret to cryptic crosswords is to not take the clues literally. There are patterns and rules that can lead you to the answer, and there are always clues to the crossword setter. There are always reasons, but they’re not what you might think they are.

5 books, part 3: Loonshots by Safi Bahcall

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Loonshot: a widely dismissed idea whose champions are often written off as crazy.

If you’ve ever worked in a corporate, I’m sure you’ll have heard somebody at some point say: “that’s not the way we do things around here”. The culture of maintaining the status quo brings about fixed mindsets, yet if there’s one constant, it’s change. To keep up in today’s technology-led, ever changing world, a business needs to be innovative.

5 books, part 2: Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

“Figuring out how to build a sustainable culture … wasn’t a singular assignment. It was a day-in-day-out, full-time job.”

Ed Catmull is the retired former president and co-founder of digital animation studio, Pixar. Creativity, Inc. is the story of how Pixar overcame the challenges all businesses face to create and maintain a successful culture as the company grew. A culture that could outlast its founders.

5 books, part 1: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

“The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”

Following on from the introduction post, if there’s one important takeaway I learned from reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahneman, it’s don’t always trust whatever thought first comes to mind.

Build better companies, teams and products with inspiration from these five books

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

“The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.”

A data centric approach to patching systems with Ansible

Tue, 04 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

When patching Linux machines these days I could forgive you for asking “how hard can it be?” Sure, a yum update -y will sort it for you in a flash…

Hardware bootstrapping with Ansible

Mon, 13 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

At a recent Ansible London Meetup I got chatting with somebody about automated hardware builds. “It’s all cloud now!” I hear you say. Ah, but for many large organisations it’s not–they still have massive data centres full of hardware. Almost regularly somebody pops up on our internal mail-list and asks “can Ansible do hardware provisioning?”. Well yes, you can provision hardware with Ansible…

Going back to a laptop

Sun, 05 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

After some technological changes at the day job, I can no longer access a lot of important things via my iPad (this, as I’m sure many of you will relate to, is a blessing and a curse). So I took a company laptop. After working on the iPad for over six months, how is that working out for me?

iPad Pro vs laptop, three months in

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a few months since I sold my trusty MacBook and bought an iPad Pro, with the idea of performing all mobile compute on the latter. How has it gone?

Migrating the runbook: a journey from legacy to DevOps

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

“Just type this invoice up for me will you please?” asked a sheepish looking Malcolm.

“I do have better things to do you know” I replied.

“Yes, yes, I know. But who else is going to do it?”

“Give it here then!”

My slides from IPExpo London

Fri, 09 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

On October 7th I gave a talk at the IPExpo show about getting from legacy IT to the modern idea of DevOps.

Simplicity - the art of automation

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

As a young lad I had my heart set on being a car designer when I grew up. This dream carried on into my teens, then for some reason it vanished. Around the same time I discovered I could ‘work’ computers, and that I quite enjoyed it.

Testing Ansible roles

Tue, 21 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

At an Ansible meetup last week somebody put this question to me: “I’m coming from the Puppet world, and there they have whole structures around testing modules (the same thing as Ansible roles) like Rspec. How do you handle the same thing with Ansible?”. Ah, this is a question I’ve heard many times. So here are my thoughts on it. I wouldn’t do it. Why ever not?! I hear you cry. Read on…

My talk and slides from IPExpo Manchester

Sun, 21 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

On May 21st I gave a talk about automation at the IPExpo Manchester show.

Managing VMware vSphere guests with Ansible Tower

Fri, 06 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

There are lots of ways to enable self-service VMs within an organisation - what some might call ‘a private cloud’. However, these usually require layers and layers of complex software. What if you could leverage your existing hypervisor and 15 lines of code to do the same? And what if those 15 lines became an even simpler single click?

Simple service discovery using Ansible Tower and DNS

Fri, 26 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Service discovery is one of those things that can be extremely handy to have, yet difficult to implement in a simple fashion. There are lots of tools out there to help, but I wanted to make something simple and easy to maintain for my specific use case. So here’s the way I’ve done it, using a couple of DNS records and Ansible Tower.

My slides from DOXLON talk

Fri, 19 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

On December 3rd I gave a talk about Ansible to the DevOps Exchange London meetup. It was targeted at introducing people to Ansible, and showing how it is so much more than just configuration management.

The Rules

Sun, 30 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The Unix philosophy. There are some wise words here.

Ansible for Puppet users

Tue, 26 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A colleague was asking me questions today about Ansible playbooks, roles, tasks etc and how they translated from Puppet nomenclature (he is coming to Ansible with Puppet experience - much the same as I did actually). He thought it would be handy to have a ’translation guide'.

My slides from London Splunk User Group talk

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

On July 23rd I gave a talk at the London Splunk User Group on automating Splunk with Ansible.

Defining 'DevOps'

Sat, 19 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

You know what, I am starting to despair of the IT industry, just a little bit.

My slides from DevOps Cardiff talk

Sat, 12 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

On July 2nd I gave a talk at DevOps Cardiff related to the blog post I wrote last year, on Puppet vs Chef vs Ansible.

Five tips for Ansible newbies

Tue, 27 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

So you’ve decided to do some infrastructure automation as part of your DevOps workflow huh? And after reading lots of Ansible versus Puppet, Chef, Saltstack etc posts, you’ve settled on Ansible. But where to start? What tips will help you get on, faster? Here are my top five things you can do to help yourself…

Logwatch output to NFS with SELinux

Sun, 12 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

As part of a log consolidation exercise I’d decided to try and put logwatch output into Splunk, to later produce some succinct analysis.

Atlassian Bamboo Install with Ansible

Sat, 21 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Jenkins seems to be the prevalent CI/CD software these days - but, truthfully, how many of you look at it and think it looks a bit, well, yuk?

Rapidly provision Jenkins on AWS using Ansible

Sun, 10 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This week I’d been fighting with a Chef install to do something relatively simple. Bogged down in a rats nest of complexity (extra Ruby scripts referencing Chef environment files, etc etc), I decided to see if there was a easier way.

The route to DevOps simplicity

Sun, 10 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The greatest piece of engineering man has ever achieved is the humble bicycle. A controversial statement, perhaps. But bear with me…

Puppet vs Chef vs Ansible

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve spent my entire IT career automating. To me, the point of technology is to make life easier, so I tend to look for any way I can to make computers do ’the heavy lifting'.

Analysing Amazon S3 logs with Splunk

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s how to get Amazon S3 bucket logs into Splunk, and then pull out the useful fields.

Running Splunk 5 behind Nginx with SSL and auth

Mon, 09 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Many articles have been written about this topic, yet none of them seem to fulfill the basic premise I wanted: get it working.

Perl::Critic and Modern::Perl

Sun, 18 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve tended to use Perl::Critic for keeping my Perl in some semblence of a readable state for a while now. And since I started using newer Perls, I’ve also used Modern::Perl instead of ‘use strict; use warnings; use feature..’

Vagrant Splunk Box

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I recommend Splunk a lot. I’ve been using it since about 2007, in varying degrees of complexity.

A Linux kickstart helper in Perl

Sat, 27 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a short while ago about using iPXE with aURL to help booting multiple versions of Linux. In that post I mentioned that I used a simple CGI to feed back the required kernel and initrd, plus a template kickstart file. As rough as it stands today, a question prompted me to publish the helper I use. So here you go, my Perl Mojolicious helper, Bacio.

Using iPXE with a URL to kickstart Linux

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Although kickstarting Linux is pretty simple, it can be frustrating if you’re trying to build different versions. Take, for example, building RHEL (CentOS/SciLin) version 5 and version 6 hosts. The initrd and vmlinuz files are version specific, and not backwards compatible. I’ve seen a DHCP/PXE configuration, in a large bank, have a sprawling and complex set of menus just to counter for different OS releases! This is quite unnecessary.

Perl LWP 'error:14094410:SSL routines:SSL3_READ_BYTES:sslv3 alert handshake failure'

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Lots and lots of solutions for this one out there in Google land, but it turned out to be much simpler…

The simplicity of Perl Mojolicious for web get extractions

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using Mojolicious quite a bit this year, and I love it.

VMware Perl SDK error 'Server version unavailable..'

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Whilst working with the VMware Perl SDK this morning I came across this error:

Problems installing DBD::mysql on OS X Snow Leopard

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

After a colleague showed me the excellent MySQL Workbench the other day I thought I’d install the packaged MySQL on my Macbook, to do a bit of Catalyst developing.

Patching a live Solaris 10 system with LU, ZFS, and PCA

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Sun have done some work in recent times with liveupgrade - the last time I looked at it, a few years back now, it was rubbish. I thought it was about time I took another look, since a lot of the updates in OpenSolaris were looking good.

Stuck as 'scheduled' Wordpress posts

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I recently edited a post on a Wordpress blog and discovered that trying to change the publish time (to bring an old post up to the top of the list) created a temporary world of pain.

rm -rf on Solaris ZFS filesystem doesn't remove directories

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This is one of the weirdest problems I’ve had for a while. On one of the servers I look after, my home directory was a zfs filesystem set to /home/user. If I ever did an rm -rf on a directory structure underneath my home dir, it would remove all the files but leave all directories in place. The only way to get rid of the directories was to recursively remove each one. Painful.

Today I discovered a fix - although I don’t know the reason why.