Distraction-free YouTube (and other videos) on your computer The free YouTube version has ads and suggestions what to watch. Those try to keep the user on YouTube’s website. Tons of useful videos exist. If you’re like me, you’ll soon fall into the rabbit hole and spend too much time on YouTube. Today I learned how to use a distraction-free method of watching YouTube with mpv and (optionally) Vimium.

Vim Language Server Protocol support for C# If you’re an avid Vim user, you’ll likely try to use the terminal editor for everything text-related. In this post, I’ll show you how to get convenient support for C# with Vim on Linux. C# is traditionally one of those programming languages that profit from an IDE, an integrated development environment. Vim can still be a viable alternative if you need minimal features like type definitions or auto-completion.

Methods from prolific learners to help you accelerate your learning We all know that life-long learning is necessary for a successful career path in web development. Tech is a fast moving field. We constantly need to keep our skills sharp. Knowing that you quickly need to learn new material does not solve the problem of how to achieve that. What methods can we use to learn a new technology, framework or language as fast as possible?

About writing beyond academic papers The Art of Writing Effectively is a fabulous lecture by Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago’s Writing Program, on being an expert and conveying your ideas. The lecture and a related workshop called Writing Beyond the Academy take around 3 hours of time to watch. It’s time worth spending, but if you want a quick overview, here are my notes.

Vim’s search and replace feature is powerful. It allows you to search for patterns with regular expressions. Use the manual’s entry via :h pattern-searches for the help menu. The basic usage for search in normal mode is / followed by the pattern for a forward search, and ? followed by a pattern for a backwards search. Search and replace: :s/<pattern to replace>/<replacement>/<flags> Search and replace in file: :%s/<pattern to replace>/<replacement>/<flags>

I’m running a VPN service via systemd on my machine. The service provides a systemd script for me. I can query the service with the standard commands, for example: sudo systemctl status strongswan.service This works fine, except when the computer went to sleep (suspend or hibernate). My machine also stops the wi-fi connection on sleep. When I wake up the machine, the wi-fi connection automatically starts again. My VPN service does not resume.

image from the Gotify website You have several devices and you want to receive notifications from your Android phone to your web browser (or vice versa). Maybe you also want to send notifications via REST API. You are a developer after all. You can think of interesting ways to send notifications. Pushbullet comes to mind, but you don’t want to sign up with Google or Facebook. You don’t want to use Google services.