Save your disk, write files directly into RAM with /dev/shm

Given my interest in extending the life of my SD cards and hard drives as much as possible, I’m surprised I haven’t come across /dev/shm before. In a word it’s a world-accessible RAM scratchpad, which seems baked right into POSIX, so that virtually every Unix EDIT: Linux system already has it mounted as a tmpfs by default: 1 2 ❯ mount | grep '/dev/shm' tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,inode64) Today’s lucky 10,000, indeed. It gets mentioned often in Hacker News comments, but surprisingly I couldn’t find any actual articles talking about it. The existence of /dev/shm is a boon for me mostly because it means I never have to worry about whether /tmp is really RAM-based again. ...

June 26, 2025

Disable your browser history to write better internal docs

Most of us work in companies with something approximating a shared online internal wiki, be it Confluence or MediaWiki or even a searchable, static website custom built for the task. A common problem with these sites is making what you write discoverable to other people on the site. Your chosen title might tell you, a person fully in the weeds of whatever you were just doing, exactly enough to know this is the article you were looking for. Another human being, who might be searching for help on how to do this for the first time? Not so much. ...

May 14, 2024