Here's a Linux utility that I recently learned about: Anacron

Simliar to cron, it runs tasks on a periodic basis, but it will ensure the task runs when the computer is on.

My use case is that I want my backup repository integrity check to run once a week on my laptop, but when a cron @weekly task is going fire (midnight on Sunday) my laptop's going to be turned off. Anacron to the rescue!

So what I did is set up an anacron task to run my backup check script once a week, and then set up cron to run anacron every 10 minutes:

*/10 * * * *  /usr/sbin/anacron -s -t $HOME/.anacron/tab -S $HOME/.anacron/spool

And here's what my anacrontab looks like:

SHELL=/bin/bash
HOME=/home/nick

# period  delay  job-id  command
# # (days)  (min)
7 0 backup-check  $HOME/bin/backup.check

I've added a new page to chronicle my bike touring trips besides whatever blog posts I make about them. Go check it out!

When redesigning my website and re-writing my static site generator Posty, I wanted to refactor the URLs for my blog posts but not leave anyone hanging when they had an old URL bookmarked. Since my website could be hosted somewhere that I don't have control over the webserver config, I had to figure out how to do this with HTML.

My website here, as of the time of writing this, is still based on a design I made back in 2010, and is rendered using my static site generator that I haven't touched in nearly as long. The site's served its purpose pretty well, but it's kind of a mess; It's unreadable on mobile devices, the CSS causes some weird inconsistencies, and the static site generator is no where near my current standards. So since this is a personal project I have the liberty of throwing it all in the trash and starting over (and learning new things along the way!).

In April of this year, I attempted to bike the Katy Trail, but I forgot how unpredictable weather could be in Missouri that time of year and got rained out. While visiting with my parents waiting for my flight back to California, I decided to do a short bike tour in the San Francisco Bay Area where at the very least I wouldn't have to deal with rain.