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iOS Shortcut to Join Cisco WebEx

guide ios shortcuts

Here is a quick iOS Shortcut to join Cisco WebEx personal rooms by email name. In my organization, once logged in to Cisco WebEx, we can join a colleague’s personal meeting room just by his or her email name. Here is a shortcut to either:

  • Launch WebEx for the contact from the Contacts App share sheet,
  • Or just run the shortcut to select email to launch WebEx.
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macOS zsh configuration

guide macos shell

From macOS Catalina 10.5 onwards, zsh is the default shell, instead of bash. I have a lot to learn about this shell, and so far, this is how I configured zsh... There is an overload of snippets on-line, but I’ve not seen a post doing what I do, so hopefully this helps someone!

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Static domain name resolution for Kubernetes pods

guide kubernetes

I recently needed to setup a Kubernetes cluster without an external DNS and without Internet access. In the old days, static IPs could be mapped to FQDNs by creating entries in the hosts file, but that won’t work with Kubernetes. With Internet access, the typical solution would be to use a wildcard DNS like xip.io or nip.io. Instead, the workaround is by hardcoding the mapping in the CoreDNS configuration.

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Shortcuts on iPhone home screen

guide ios shortcuts

Here’s how I “changed” an app’s home screen icon on iPhone. I’m so OCD that I want my home screen dock icons (the tray at the bottom) to be all of the same colour! Actually, changing an icon is not possible, but creating a new shortcut with an icon of my choice is!

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Wiring up Node.js and MongoDB containers

guide container

Previously, I described my development environment setup using Docker containers. I do it in a totally different way from most tutorials, which I don’t believe leverage containers and complicate things by having to build images for development.

Here I explain how I wire up (i.e. network) a few containers - a MongoDB database, a Mongo Express User Interface to manage the database, and a Node.js container using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) to authenticate users against the database.

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Setting up Node.js in a Docker container

guide container

In this post I share with you how I set up a simple Docker container for Node.js development. I’ve never found a simple tutorial for beginners that meets my needs!

My requirement is to do all development debugging in a container, so I am assured of consistent behaviour in any environment. I do not want to install Node.js or npm locally on my mac! I cannot be bothered to use a Makefile or Dockerfile to build images - this is only required in the final stage for production!

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Optimizing Grav page speed

guide grav

I’m usually quite pedantic when it comes to minimizing code and optimizing web page performance. I was a bit surprised to find that this blog’s page speed was far from ideal! Google PageSpeed Insights returned a very low score for this blog. Back when I started this blow, I must’ve neglected optimization, as I was too busy learning Grav, modifying my template, etc.

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