Cli on Andrew Quinn's TILs

Copy-Item is 27 percent slower than File Explorer drag and drop on Windows

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

File Explorer drag & drop     ########## (112 MBps)
Copy-Item                     #######    (82 MBps)
Built in SFTP client          ######     (70 MBps)
Built in robocopy (/MT:32)    ##         (25 MBps)
WSL 2 rsync                   #          (13 MBps)

In table form:

Tool	Speed (MBps)	Difference
Drag and drop	~112	—
`Copy-Item`	~82	-27%
`sftp`	~70	-37%
`robocopy` (with `/MT:32`)	~25 MBps	-78%
`rsync` (WSL 2)	~13 MBps	-88%

I feel like I’m losing my mind.

Cross-platform TUIs are easier than cross-platform GUIs

Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Below is a GIF of tsk, my pocket Finnish-to-English dictionary, running in my terminal emulator of choice under Linux. It’s what the kids call a TUI, a graphical program that just happens to drive its graphics using terminal graphics instead of graphics-graphics.

Insert GIF here.

You can probably tell that this program fits neatly into the “home-cooked meal” clade of programs. There is a very straightforward problem I want solved - fast, single-executable-portable dictionary lookup, with a few conveniences for the busy language learner layered on top. I am quite happy with tsk in its current iteration and don’t plan to add much more to it anytime soon. It would still save me a lot of time and hassle if I were the only person who could use it.

`python -m http.server` as ephemeral Dropbox

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Ever need to download a file from a server – or get someone else to download a file from a server, who may not be comfortable with or should have access to scp or sftp?

Turns out, if you have Python installed – and you probably do – it comes with a handy one-liner file server for just such an occasion:

`1`	`python -m http.server 12345 # or whatever port you prefer`

Common-sense security for SSH on a new Debian server

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Last night I went to DigitalOcean and spun up a tiny new, $4/month droplet – on my own dime! It sounds crazy, but I’ve never actually wanted to pay for hosting myself before. But I have a fun little web app cooking up, one that might eventually pay that $4/month back with interests, and I decided, why not, it’s time to finally put some of my own skin in the game with this whole sysadmin thing.

The self-hosted to DevOps engineer pipeline

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What’s the best way to get a job? Show someone with a job to do that you can do the job within their iron triangle. What’s the best way you can show someone you can handle a complicated k8s deployment, with 7 different CNCF-approved add-ons, zero-downtime rollouts and a whole bunch of YAML files? Probably by competently and publicly running your own complicated k8s infrastructure.

Self-hosters remind me a lot of the sysadmins of yore, who mostly ended up in the profession because they just couldn’t help but mess around with their underlying computing machine until they knew all kinds of weird nooks and crannies within it. I trace my own lineage in software deveopment back to the day my parents finally purchased a Dell laptop and a 300 Kbps Internet connection (residential wiring in Boston left something to be desired), and promptly broke the Windows registry and installed Ubuntu without them ever realizing anything had changed. The next year I got my first internship through a high school program as a Unix admin intern at Akamai, and the rest is history.

The highest personal ROI program I have written so far

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It would have to be finstem, a simple command-line program I wrote to reduce Finnish words down to their root form.

Finnish is a lot like Latin or Russian in that its words often become lumbering behemoths of rewritten consonants, suffixes upon suffixes, and this makes it hard to look up in a dictionary – that is, until you factor in its very regular orthography and the phenomenal efforts of the Finnish programming industry: finstem is basically a very specialized UI for the OpenOffice spell checker, and I have no shame in admitting that.

fd + xargs + bat = quick document review

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been on vacation this week, and part of what I’ve been up to is fixing up the Selkouutiset Archive. Like most of my websites these days, SA is powered by Hugo, which means handling a lot of Markdown documents, which means I opted to use an intermediate Git repo as a submodule to actually store the custom-processed documents.

After a few tweaks here and there, I found myself wanting to quickly flip through all of the Markdown documents I had generated for each news day. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for, just that I would know it when I saw it. So:

wall: Broadcast message all Linux users

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

`1`	`wall "Hello, world!"`

will send a message that looks like

1
2
3

Broadcast message from root@localhost (pts/0) (Sat Feb  1 14:50:14 2024):

Hello world!

to every user currently logged in to the system.

When might this be relevant? When you’re working in a small team, by remoting into custom hardware, and constantly reflashing the device, to give everyone a heads up, for instance: