Vignette d'assurance cycliste
Classified in : Homepage, To remember, Vélo
Lorsqu'on circule à moto ou en automobile, on doit avoir un certificat d'assurance, sous la forme d'une vignette verte bien visible sur le véhicule.
À vélo, rien de tel, l'assurance n'étant pas obligatoire. Pour autant, presque tous les cyclistes sont assurés en responsabilité civile sans le savoir ! Pour faciliter l'identification de l'assureur en cas de collision, j'ai donc rédigé un générateur de vignette d'assurance pour les cyclistes, à imprimer et à installer à un endroit visible sur le vélo.
Safely untying a shoelace knot
Classified in : Homepage, Miscellaneous, To remember
Untying a shoelace knot is easy, but sometimes, one end got through a loop, and you end up blocking the knot. I invented a way to safely untie such a knot, regardless of whether or not it has been messed up, all with a single hand!
Homemade U-lock holder
Classified in : Homepage, Miscellaneous, To remember, Bike
A U-lock is, arguably, one of the best ways to secure a bicycle against theft. When you buy one, it comes with a holder to carry it on the bike frame. Now, while the lock, basically made of hardened steel, is very tough and will probably last more than ten years, the holder is made of plastic, and will fail after a couple of years. Then, like most cyclist, you will have to carry your lock on the rack, which is far less practical.
There are several ways to make a U-lock holder; here is mine, which I have never found documented, so I may have actually invented it. It requires very simple material, it is very easy to implement, and it is quite durable and practical to use.
Bad support of ZIP archives with extra fields
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Command line, To remember
For sharing multiple files, it is often convenient to pack them into an archive, and the most widely supported format to do so is probably ZIP. Under *nix, you can archive a directory with Info-ZIP:
% zip -r something.zip something/
(When you have several files, it is recommended to archive them in a directory, to avoid cluttering the directory where people will extract them.)
Generate man pages for awscli
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Command line, To remember
No man pages, but almost
The AWS Command Line Interface, which is available in Debian,
provides no man page. Instead, that tool has an integrated help system,
which allows you to run commands such as aws rds
help, that, for what I have seen, generates some
reStructuredText, then converts it to a man page in troff format, then
calls troff to convert it to text with basic formatting, and eventually
passes it to a pager. Since this is close to what man does, the
result looks like a degraded man page, with some features missing such
as the adaptation to the terminal width.
Well, this is better than nothing, and better than what many
under-documented tools can offer, but for several reasons, it still
sucks: most importantly, it does not respect administrators' habits and
it does not integrate with the system man database. You it does not
allow you to use commands such as apropos,
and you will get no man page name auto-completion from your shell since
there is no man page.