til

Installing tools written in Go

Today I learned how to install tools from GitHub that are written in Go, using github.com/icholy/semgrepx as an example: go install github.com/icholy/semgrepx@latest Running this command grabs a copy…

Rewriting a repo to contain the history of just specific files

I wanted to start a new git repository containing just the history of two specific files from my help-scraper repository.

Upgrading a pipx application to an alpha version

I wanted to upgrade my git-history installation to a new alpha version. doesn't work for that, because it upgrades to the most recent stable version - but I wanted the alpha.

Using SQL with GDAL

Inspired by Brad Neuberg I decided to take a look at the SQL features in the GDAL family of tools. GDAL is a complex beast.

Running pytest against a specific Python version with uv run

While working on this issue I figured out a neat pattern for running the tests for my project locally against a specific Python version using uv run: The new-to-me trick here is that works for adding…

Streaming indented output of a JSON array

I wanted to produce the following output from a command-line tool: But I wanted to do it from a streaming iterator - without first buffering the entire output in an in-memory Python list and calling…

Reusing an existing Click tool with register_commands

The register commands plugin hook lets you add extra sub-commands to the CLI tool. I have a lot of existing tools that I'd like to also make available as plugins.

Running a gpt-oss eval suite against LM Studio on a Mac

OpenAI's gpt-oss models come with an eval suite, which is described in their Verifying gpt-oss implementations cookbook.

Saving an in-memory SQLite database to a file in Python

I was messing around in Python with an in-memory SQLite database, when I decided I actually wanted to save my experimental database to a file so I could explore it using Datasette.

Using awk to add a prefix

I wanted to dynamically run the following command against all files in a directory: I can't use here because I need each file to be processed using the option. I found a solution using .

Skipping CSV rows with odd numbers of quotes using ripgrep

I'm working with several huge CSV files - over 5 million rows total - and I ran into a problem: it turned out there were a few lines in those files that imported incorrectly because they were not…

Start, test, then stop a localhost web server in a Bash script

I wanted to write a bash script that would start a Datasette server running, run a request against it using , then stop the server again.

Loading radio.garden into SQLite using jq

http://radio.garden/ is an amazing website which displays a 3D globe covered in radio stations and lets you listen to any of them. I wanted to have a play around with their data.

Switching between gcloud accounts

I have two different Google Cloud accounts active at the moment. Here's how to list them with : And to switch between them with :

Writing Fly logs to S3

Fly offers fly-log-shipper as a container you can run in a Fly application to send all of the logs from your other applications to a logging provider. Several providers are supported.

__init_subclass__

David Beazley on Twitter said: I think 95% of the problems once solved by a metaclass can be solved by instead This inspired me to finally learn how to use it!

Social media cards generated with shot-scraper

My TIL website has social media card images to make links shared from it look slightly more interesting when shared on sites like Mastodon and Twitter.

The simplest recursive CTE

I found this really simple recursive CTE useful for ensuring I understood how to write recursive CTEs. This query returns five rows from a single column - from 0 to 4.

Making HTTP calls using IPv6

Tiny TIL today: I learned how to make an HTTP call to an IPv6 address. The trick is to enclose the address in the URL in square braces: http:// 2a09:8280:1::1:2741 Here's that working as a request to…

Updating stable docs in ReadTheDocs without pushing a release

I use ReadTheDocs for several of my projects. It's fantastic: among other things, it makes it easy to publish the documentation for my latest branch at and the documentation for my latest release at…