I've been keeping a computer setup page on my website for a while, describing the exact steps needed to make a computer work how I want after a new OS install. I've also had a note there for years saying eventually I should use Ansible for this. This weekend I finally got around to it, and learned a little bit about Ansible while I was at it.
How to buy a mattress online (with reviews)
My girlfriend and I both replaced our mattresses this fall. Because we have different sizes of mattresses and different preferences, and neither of our first picks worked for us, I ended up trying out almost all of the popular online mattresses. I also spent some time learning about mattresses before making my second pick, so this post will be a guide to how to pick a mattress, with some specific advice regarding the mattresses we tried.
Setting a minimum viewport width for responsive pages
My hobby recently has been making website scale better on phones, but I ran into a problem on several of them: The viewport meta tag assumes that a website either has a fixed width or that it scales to any possible width. I investigated several solutions and eventually settled on an (apparently) novel one: Check the screen size, and if it's too small, add a new meta tag with a fixed viewport. I also wrote a JavaScript polyfill that lets me just set a min-width in the viewport tag.
Monitoring servers with Monit
This machine runs a lot of services and I don't use all of them. After breaking several of them and not noticing (again), I decided to finally set up service monitoring. After some research, Monit was relatively easy to set up and seems to meet my needs. I figured other people might want some examples of how to use it, so this post describes how to set it up and you can see my config file at the end.
Getting patches into open source projects
There's an open source project you want to use, but it's missing a feature you need, or has a bug you need fixed. You can implement it yourself, but you want to make sure the patch will be accepted by the project's maintainers. This guide will explain how best to minimize wasted effort and improve the chances of your code being accepted.