A quick tutorial on using Imagemagick to remove a background colour from images. The image file format needs to support transparency e.g. PNG. NOTE: JPG doesnt support transparency, so it would be necessary to convert the file. Remove background color Set the input file 1input="old-white.png" Set the output …

A quick tutorial on using Imagemagick to add a background shadow to images. For the best result, ensure the original image has a transparent background. It is also useful to observe consistent sizes for the images. Add a shadow Set the name of the input image - for example 1input="old.png" Set the name of the …

Convert JSON to CSV with JQ. jq is like sed for JSON data - you can use it to slice and filter and map and transform structured data with the same ease that sed, awk, grep and friends let you play with text. Being able to move between different file format is quite a common task, so I was delighted to find a quick …

How to use Buildpacks on ChromeOS (Debian Buster). What is a buildpack? "A buildpack is something you’ve probably leveraged without knowing, as they’re currently being used in many cloud platforms. A buildpack’s job is to gather everything your app needs to build and run, and it often does this job quickly and …

Introduction Build, test, and deploy on the Google Cloud serverless CI/CD platform. Cloud Build scales up and scales down in response to load with no need to pre-provision servers or pay in advance for additional capacity. Pay only for what you use. In this blog post, Cloud Build is used for the automation of Hugo …

"PDFtk - The PDF Toolkit. PDFtk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents. It comes in three flavors: PDFtk Free, PDFtk Pro, and our original command-line tool PDFtk Server." In this blog post learn how to install PDFTK used to edit PDF. Install PDFTK on debian 1sudo apt install pdftk …

"PDFtk - The PDF Toolkit. PDFtk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents. It comes in three flavors: PDFtk Free, PDFtk Pro, and our original command-line tool PDFtk Server." In a prior blog post, the PDFTK utility was installed. Now use the utility to remove a watermark from a PDF. Get …

Introduction Tmux is a terminal multiplexer. It lets you switch easily between several programs in one terminal, detach them (they keep running in the background) and reattach them to a different terminal. If you work at the command line, manage multiple machines or work in the Cloud you will definitely want to …

Introduction If you want to build a container image there are lots of options available. Docker, Buildpacks and Cloud Build provides a very convienient way to manage builds. In this blog post, we will use Cloud Build to create an image based on a configuration. Google Cloud Project Definitely check out Free Tier to try …

Introduction Blogging is a really good way to make notes on the things you have learned over the years. Previously I used Wordpress to capture my notes but I found it quite cumbersome. More recently I became aware of Hugo and decided to give it a try (spoilers this site is the result). Hugo is a really amazing piece of …