Tech projects at start of 2023
I had a thought about what's on my wish-list for tech tasks that I'd like to complete this year, and then it struck me that there's a lot going on to update my blog with.
Control Characters
Have you ever wondered about the Unix terminal control keys: <kbd>Ctl</kbd>-<kbd>C</kbd> to interrupt a program, or Ctl-D to close the terminal? Do you know what Ctl-L does? Why does your computer beep if you press Ctl-G, but not other control keys?
The answer is that by holding down the Control key and typing a letter, you're sending a “control character” to the computer.
But what are these control characters, and why is there a seemingly random association between letters of the alphabet, and functions of the terminal?
GitLab Profile Multi-project Pipeline
I my previous post I relayed setting up a GitLab scheduled profile to add blog posts from this site's RSS feed into my personalised GitLab profile. I discussed setting up a new profile project, creating the README, fetching and parsing the RSS and inserting it into the README, and creating a pipeline to add the changed README back to the profile project. Finally I scheduled the pipeline to run once daily.
Since I don't actually write a post every single day, this mainly runs to no purpose, consuming CI minutes and filling the job logs with pointless runs. It would be better if the pipeline had a job to update the README only after I've actually made a blog post.