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Shing Lyu
Disclaimer: This content reflects my personal opinions, not those of any organizations I am or have been affiliated with. Code samples are provided for illustration purposes only, use with caution and test thoroughly before deployment.
I’ve been using TiddlyWiki for note-taking for a few years. I use them to keep track of my technical notes and checklists. TiddlyWiki is a brilliant piece of software. It is a single HTML file with a note-taking interface, where the notes you take are stored directly in the HTML file itself, so you can easily carry (copy) the file around and easily deploy it online for sharing. However, most modern browsers don’t allow web pages to access the filesystem, so in order to let TiddlyWiki save the notes, you need to rely on browser extensions or Dropbox integration service like TiddlyWiki in the Sky. But they still have some frictions.
So recently I started to look for other alternatives for note-taking.
The Problem: My stock broker outsourced their Android app to a third-party company, so LastPass treat the desktop website and Android app as different sites. Although I can save them separately in LassPass, their password won’t synchronize with each other.
Three years ago, I wrote the FocusBlocker to help me focus on my master thesis. It’s basically a website blocker that stops me from checking Facebook every five minute. But is different from other blockers like LeechBlock that requires you to set a fixed schedule. FocusBlocker lets you set a quota, e.g. I can browse 10 minutes of Facebook then block it for 50 minutes. So as long as you have remaining quota, you can check Facebook anytime. I’m glad that other people find it useful, and I even got my first donation through AMO because of happy users.
Since this extension serves my need, I’m not actively maintaining it or adding new features. But I was aware of Firefox’s transition from the legacy Add-on SDK to WebExtension API. So before WebExtension API is fully available, I started to migrate it to Chrome’s extension format. But I didn’t got the time to actually migrate it back to Firefox, until a user emails me asking for a WebExtension version. I looked into the statistics, the daily active user count drops from ~1000 to ~300. That’s when I rolled up my sleeve and actually migrated it in one day. (Although later I found out that the drop is not entirely due to users upgrading to newer Firefox, is because of this change.) Here is how I did it and what I’ve learned from the process.
It has been a while since my last post. I’ve been busy for the first half of this year but now I got more free time. Hopefully I can get back to my usual pace of one post per months.
My old laptop (Inhon Carbonbook, discontinued) had a swollen battery. I kept using it for a few months but then the battery squeezed my keyboard so I can no longer type correctly. After some research I decided to buy the ThinkPad 13 model because it provides descent hardware for its price, and the weight (~1.5 kg) is acceptable.
Every time I got a new computer the first thing is to get Linux up and running. So here are my notes on how to install Ubuntu Linux on it.
TL;DR: Everything works out of the box. Just remember to turn off secure boot and shrink the disk in Windows before you install.