Articles by John Nduli

Kubernetes Basics

"We've got this project on kubernetes that you'll be helping maintain"

This started my journey with kubernetes. I found a great tutorial from freecodecamp and this blog is an attempt to set up some personal projects using it. It's best to read the original though as it's more in-depth.

I …

Sending Mail from Cron in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

I created a cronjob to back up my server content and wanted to test out emailing of errors when they occurred. To set this up, I installed msmtp and msmtp-mta to help send emails using an smtp server and bsd-mailx to test sending emails from terminal. The cronjob entry was …

Static Website with Pandoc

I needed to pull off a quick website that would have various mathematics questions, and thought to try and use pandoc. Here are my learnings:

I first installed pandoc-bin because I didn't to deal with a lot of haskell dependencies.

yay -S pandoc-bin

The first iteration I made generated an …

Comment System Using Recursive Queries

I was reading SQL antipatterns and got into the chapter about recursive queries and how there are different ways to approach this. I wanted to experiment with this and found that postgresql supports recursive queries. I decided to make a simple commenting database and see how it would work.

Fibonnacci …

TaskLite Setup

I used vimwiki for task management, with a couple of custom snippets and scripts, but this quickly became complicated. I needed another tool that would be easy to use, easy to understand and easy to tweak. TaskLite fit these conditions perfectly:

  • It's build on haskell and sqlite, a language and …

Copying Pass Secrets to Another Machine

I had a new laptop but couldn't access my previous one, so I had to figure out how to get my pass secrets. I had these problems:

  • How would I get my old password store?
  • How would I be able get my old gpg keys into this new laptop?
  • I …

Thinkpad T440 ArchLinux Setup

I recently got a Thinkpad T440 and decided to document the steps I took to set up archlinux. The last time I'd done this was on the Asus Zenbook UX330UA some years back. I thought the process would be different, but it was largely similar.

I first got the iso …

Custom snippets in vim

Set up

I use ultisnips for my snippets. To set this up, I have this in vimrc:

call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')

Plug 'SirVer/ultisnips' | Plug 'honza/vim-snippets' " Snippet support
call plug#end()


let g:UltiSnipsExpandTrigger="<c-e>" " Default is <tab>
let g:UltiSnipsEditSplit="vertical"
let g:UltiSnipsSnippetDirectories=["UltiSnips", "mysnippets"]

This …

First Haskell Parser (for Kindle Highlights)

Kindle saves highlights, bookmarks and notes in a My Clippings.txt file. I needed a way to parse it and filter out the content I wanted. I also wanted to work on a parser in haskell, so this was a great opportunity to get my hands dirty.

I used stack …

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