Skylar MacDonald
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skye.fyi
Skylar MacDonald
@skye.fyi
CAD & Technical Lead/nerd at London Ambulance Service. Bork maintainer. Tech stuff, NHS/999 stuff, occasional Excel witchcraft. Views and boosts, regrettably, my own.

🌉 bridged from https://tilde.zone/@skylar on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
Handy travel phrases for all occasions!
December 4, 2025 at 7:24 AM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
SPOTIFY WRAPPED

You listened to 0 songs. That's 0 seconds of music! You don't have a Spotify account.
December 3, 2025 at 6:34 PM
RE: https://chaos.social/@jonty/115655758978093370

amazed that I have not received this particular spam
chaos.social
December 3, 2025 at 1:07 PM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
I was today years old when I learned about the `at` command in the unix shell??

Very useful for if I want to lazily do something non-critical in the near future. Like I upload a file for a friend, send them the link, tell them it's getting deleted in an hour, and then do

$ echo 'rm the_file' | […]
Original post on friend.camp
friend.camp
December 2, 2025 at 2:53 PM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
announcing Advent of Zines 2025: where Wizard Zines is doing a giveaway of 1 zine for the first 15 days in December!

this is part of the "Buy One Give One" program we've had since I started Wizard Zines in 2018, where we give away 1 PDF zine for every copy […]

[Original post on social.jvns.ca]
November 30, 2025 at 7:31 PM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
Worf: Have you tried unplugging it and then just leaving it unplugged?
November 29, 2025 at 6:35 AM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
i hope this email finds you well
November 28, 2025 at 6:27 PM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
Do all the 'just use Linux' people understand that a lot of us have work laptops, provided by our employers, which we cannot tinker with extensively even if we were capable and wanting to??

'Just use Linux' is not a fucking solution to everything
Stop
#linux #windows #genai #noai #copilot
November 19, 2025 at 10:02 PM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
It's on apt. It's literally on Cargo. It's on DockerHub with ads. It's literally on nuget. You can probably find it on snap. Dude it's on portage. It's a Homebrew original. It's on pacman. You can download it on nixpkgs. You can go to pkgsrc and watch it. Log onto the Windows Store right now.
November 20, 2025 at 3:24 AM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
🆕 blog! “The Peaceful Transfer of Power in Open Source Projects”

Most of the people who run Open Source projects are mortal. Recent history shows us that they will all eventually die, or get bored, or win the lottery, or get sick, or be conscripted, or lose their mind.

If you've ever visited a […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
November 19, 2025 at 12:35 PM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
It's called Blink because you have 182 copies of it
Is it just me, or is every IDE basically VS Code and every browser basically Chrome?
October 21, 2025 at 8:19 PM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
i have personal beef with palo alto networks for just existing
November 17, 2025 at 2:25 PM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
Problem: You have your printer listed twice for some reason, only one of them works, and you can never remember which one
Solution: Delete both and re-add the printer
Results: You have three copies of your printer listed
November 16, 2025 at 11:07 PM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
last night at a bar I learned that they improved pinball by making machines that are entirely computers and they’re much better than what we had before
November 16, 2025 at 6:43 PM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
in UNIX, everything is a file except for the beating heart of the serpent, which is an ioctl
November 8, 2025 at 1:37 AM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
ever since I learned about three-cueing I've developed infinitely more patience for replies on social media. mfers literally do not know how to read. people are walking around conjuring random meanings into words they don't know, and they don't know a lot of words. it's crazy
November 11, 2025 at 6:15 PM
New blog! I was yesterday years old when I learned that non-interactive shells don't source your `.zshrc` file. https://skye.fyi/2025/11/nova-rails-chruby
Getting Rails tasks in Nova to work with chruby
**TL;DR: Set up chruby in your`.zshenv` file instead of `.zshrc`.** I recently bought Nova by Panic. I absolutely love it. I was formerly a die-hard Sublime Text fan — and I still am, really, for more ‘general purpose’ editing outside of a Project™ — but before that, I used to use Coda (RIP) by Panic, and Nova feels like its spiritual successor. Like most IDEs, Nova has tasks to allow you to run build scripts and that sort of thing. Because of its extensions framework, you can get loads of tasks that work with different frameworks and languages. (I promise this is not a sponsored post.) ## Ruby, Rails, and controlling snakes with gems Perhaps unfortunately for me given recent developments, I am a Rails programmer.1 But on the bright side, there’s an excellent Nova extension for Rails that makes life a lot easier. Until, that is, you go to run the dev server, and it does this: /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/2.6/usr/lib/ruby/2.6.0/bundler/lockfile_parser.rb:108:in `warn_for_outdated_bundler_version': You must use Bundler 2 or greater with this lockfile. (Bundler::LockfileError) Bother. It’s using the built-in macOS Ruby there, isn’t it? See, the world of Ruby has moved on, but macOS’s built-in utilities have not. Ruby is up to version 3.4.7 at time of writing, and as you can see above the version bundled with macOS is ossified at version 2.6.0. And, well, the big number at the front means breaking changes. I manage my Rubies on my Mac with chruby. That is one of many ways to do this, and you can argue amongst yourselves2 what the best one is. chruby requires you to `source` a script in your `.profile` or `.bashrc` / `.zshrc` file, which sets up the `chruby()` function used to switch different versions of it into your PATH. But the problem is, Nova runs its tasks in a **non-interactive** shell. And before I bought Nova, I had no idea what one of those was. Now, I use zsh as my shell on my Mac, which you probably do too if you have updated past Catalina or care about this sort of thing. You probably have to do this sort of nonsense for Bash as well, and as dearly as I love Bash I have only done this in zsh. Just so you’re aware. ## The thing I did not know Very, _very_ simply: * **Interactive** shells are the ones you can type in — one of which is your **login** shell. You can run commands in these shells and do all your usual stuff. * **Non-interactive** shells run scripts and you can’t touch them. Everything you need to access needs to be in your shell config when it starts, or your script will fail. The key difference: non-interactive shells **don’t source your`.zshrc` or `.zprofile` configs** when they start. This is really tricky to get to the bottom of, because when you open the _terminal_ in Nova, it **is** interactive (because you can type in it). Fortunately, those clever people who made zsh have thought of this, and you can create a `.zshenv` file in your home directory that _does_ get sourced in non-interactive shells. So, contrary to the instructions you’re given when you install chruby, what you actually want to do is set up chruby in there. So I stuck these lines in my newly-created `.zshenv` file: source /opt/homebrew/share/chruby/chruby.sh source /opt/homebrew/share/chruby/auto.sh And it _still_ didn’t work! ## Another gotcha I use chruby’s `auto.sh` script to automatically select the correct version of Ruby based on a `.ruby-version` file in the project root — but Nova _still_ wanted to run the Rails server with the built-in Ruby. How bizarre! `auto.sh` works by adding a pre-exec hook to run itself, like this:3 if [[ -n "$ZSH_VERSION" ]]; then if [[ ! "$preexec_functions" == *chruby_auto* ]]; then preexec_functions+=("chruby_auto") fi elif [[ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]]; then trap '[[ "$BASH_COMMAND" != "$PROMPT_COMMAND" ]] && chruby_auto' DEBUG fi (The `chruby_auto()` function is defined further up the file.) It transpires that pre-exec hook doesn’t run in non-interactive shells. So you need to force `chruby_auto()` to run. Mercifully, this is as easy as adding it to the end of your `.zshenv`: source /opt/homebrew/share/chruby/chruby.sh source /opt/homebrew/share/chruby/auto.sh chruby_auto And as if by magic: It works! ## Et voila I mostly wrote this up so I can remember how to do it again if I ever need to. But hopefully that helps you if you find yourself in this situation. I imagine this also works if you’re trying to use chruby-ed Rubies in other non-interactive environments, but this is the context in which I had to figure it out. Merry chruby-ing! 1. Although _he_ and I have vastly different recollections of London. Especially given that I actually live here! ↩ 2. You may not argue _with me_ about this, because I don’t care. ↩ 3. See the full source file here. ↩
skye.fyi
November 11, 2025 at 5:53 PM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
My dad who is 81 recently got into trouble cause the app where he pays his bills decided that his phone is too old.

He has a fully functional phone that’s a couple of years old but he now needs to throw it away because of software.

I think this is bullshit.
November 8, 2025 at 1:37 PM
RE: https://mastodon.social/@bitboxer/115404946902709338

[insert joke about the us-east-1 outage]
Hally international #sloth 🦥 day 🥳
October 20, 2025 at 8:25 AM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
Reasonably sure Mastodon peeps like libraries and might like a peek at this wowzer I stepped into today.

#dascdmx
September 28, 2025 at 6:12 AM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
Bruce Schneier has a good high-level look at threat-modeling under an authoritarian government. Alas, it’s not amenable to a simple recipe approach, but involves carefully thinking through the tradeoffs […]

[Original post on infosec.exchange]
September 28, 2025 at 5:55 PM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
This satirical blog post really illustrates the problem with a lot of technical writing. Amazing technical writing is so good and then everything else reads like this

https://anniemueller.com/posts/how-i-a-non-developer-read-the-tutorial-you-a-developer-wrote-for-me-a-beginner
我,一个初学开发的人,是如何阅读你,一个开发者,为我编写的教程的
How I, a beginner developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me (anniemueller.com) 09:27  ↑ 106 HN Points
anniemueller.com
September 24, 2025 at 6:04 AM
Reposted by Skylar MacDonald
Yeah. Well... I think there will be a bunch of us relearning how to "surf" the web again.

Web rings are on the rise, and blog rolls, and 88*31 link buttons.

The search engines suck, so we'll be curating and collecting and sharing with each other over here now, thanks for nothing, Google […]
Original post on front-end.social
front-end.social
September 18, 2025 at 9:40 PM