Automation

Cronjob: Basics and reboot

One of Linux five star things is the cronjobs. They allow you to automatically run stuf (scripts, applications, etc.) at quite specific times. The crontab is the place controlling when the stuff is run and you can list the crontab using the commaand crontab -l for the current user. If you want to edit the crontab, just use the command crontab -e and it launches the crontab in the default editor (set EDITOR env variable to change the editor used).

Baking Audiobooks with m4baker

Building audiobooks on (Debian) Linux in the m4b format is actually possible and doesn’t have to be a pain. I’ve found numerous recipes with shell instructions, but having a nice simple app to handle the building of the books seems much easier. Most of the apps available for Linux seemed to be in a pre-alpha state, but after a few experiments I’ve settled on m4baker, which - while a bit rough - actually seems to do the job just fine.

Are you ready for transparency?

Running a modern IT platform is rarely an easy nor isolated task. Most platforms consist of a fairly large number of components ranging from OS level to 3. party libraries and components added in the user interfacing layers - and adding numerous integrations does make it an interesting challenge to quickly identify and correct bugs and errors. While the system complexity does pose a challenge is surely not an impossible task, as several tools exists for most - if not all - platforms to allow instrumentation of the platform and utilize the instrumentation tools to handle the platform and identify issues quickly.