#Technology

When moving your content - your blog or website for example - to a new system, it’s ideal to keep things working as close to as they used to as they can. That way, any links that have been posted to your old content will still direct them to the same stuff on your new website.

An issue that can crop up is when your different content management systems have different ways of storing posts…

My personal website has been hosted on Github pages for just shy of 3 years now. In that time, the service has been fantastically reliable and fast. As I have slowly added features to the website, however, the resulting code gradually getting larger has made it so that fixing breakages and adding more improvements has become untenable.

I’ve been gradually using Gitlab more over Github in the past year for my git needs. Access to private repositories as a free user is something that has come in handy for my purposes, mainly backing up research data analyses and writing. They too offer a project-hosting solution in the form of Gitlab pages.

Allowing visitors to share pages to social media is a good way of disseminating information and driving traffic to your website. The issue I have previously had with it has been that the recommended methods, embedded buttons, relied on adding a script to each of your pages, which had the potential to slow down page loading times or track your usage across different websites. HTML hyperlinks, on the other hand, are universally supported and provide a pretty easy to use way for visitors to directly create a post.

R is a popular statistical computing environment based around a readily interpretable language, with the additional benefit of being free. There is a bit of a learning curve to it, but with plenty of resources available on the internet and with an appropriate development platform/editor, refining your analysis with it is relatively unproblematic. One commonly used platform is RStudio, featuring a number of features including syntax highlighting and code completion.

Obtaining RStudio is relatively painless; the software is open source and there are binaries available for numerous systems (Windows, Mac, Linux). There is even a version allowing you to run it from a server. But what of mobile devices? After all, I sometimes don’t have my computer with me, such as when I’m at conferences or seminars, and internet access is not guaranteed at all times. In this post, I’ll go through the process of compiling the web-accessible server version of RStudio locally onto an Android mobile phone, to use on the Run!

OpenSCAD is a popular tool to design 3D models using a powerful yet easy-to-learn scripting interface. Different to some other programs that allow you to shape a model more directly, this approach may have benefits in allowing you to specify measurements precisely, and allowing for easy reproducibility.

I’ve been playing around with it recently for some research related projects, and I’ve found that it is relatively easy on system resources, running well on my low end notebook computer. Today I’ll be outlining how to generate a basic modular grid/fenestrated surface using a few lines of code.

I’d been thinking that there was something wrong with my CloudFlare DNS settings, which made them not work when setting a domain record for tumblr. Turns out, theres a quirky interaction thats stopping it from functioning when a domain is managed “On CloudFlare” (through their traffic acceleration services).

It seems that Namecheap, one of the better known domain registrars on the internet, are currently running a promotion for students. What they’re offering is one year’s registration to a .me domain name, which is a pretty good deal in itself. Coupled with this, you have the choice of either a ready to go Github pages website (web hosting for the associated online Git repository hosting service), or a premium subscription to about.me (a simple online profile generator).

Because jekyll parses markdown when generating your static site, you can make use of javascript and variables to create a simple, customisable archive of all your posts.

The University of Melbourne participates in the eduroam system, a location independant wireless network. University students and staff are able to connect and securely authenticate to this network wherever there is participating wireless infrastructure (such as at other higher education institutions).Alongside this, on campus an internal wireless network, UniWireless, also operates.

Both function well enough to allow students and staff to connect to the internet. However, configuration settings are somewhat difficult to come by, especially if you want to set it up manually before visiting other universities. This document will cover the settings I use in network-manager to connect to each network on Xubuntu, an Ubuntu based Linux distro

With the discontinuation of the free hosting option by Crucial, I found myself in the market for web hosting. My needs have been to this date simple and very low end; I was using it to essentially serve a webpage with links to ways to get in touch with me. For this, migrating to Crucial’s paid service made little sense, as it would more than likely go underutilised.