PBS Tidbit 12 — XKPasswd Rewrite Exits Beta

In this tidbit episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots and Helma van der Linden start by reviewing how she took the reins of the XKPasswd project to first convert it from Perl to JavaScript, then to rewrite the web app. After that, she separated the JavaScript library from the web app code. This episode is primarily walking through exactly how she accomplished that split. And now XKPasswd is officially out of beta and available at xkpasswd.net You can find Helma's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net.

Last time we learned how to install Ruby, install Bundler, install Gems, and build a very simple website using Jekyll as our static site generator into GitHub. In this installment of our Jekyll miniseries, Bart explains Jekyll's build process which is mostly automated by how you name things and the content of the files you create (like adding YAML front matter.) Then we spend some quality time bemoaning how the Jekyll developers reuse the word "assets" to mean two different things. Bart avoids some of the associated confusion by creating some naming conventions of our own. We get to do a worked example where we learn a little bit about Pages in Jekyll and do a few things the hard way that we'll redo the easy way in the coming installments. If you're following along realtime, note that we won't be recording for 6 weeks because of some birthdays and Allison's trip to Japan.

In our miniseries on GitHub Pages, we learn how to create a basic Jekyll site. To do this, we must install a modern version of Ruby, install its Gem Bundler, create a little placeholder site, and then serve Jekyll to view our site locally. We push it to GitHub where the GitHub Actions we learned about last time do their magic and create a real website all for free. But we didn't stop there. One of our goals is to create our own theme, and to build on what we get with Bootstrap. We actually download the source, not compiled version of Bootstrap and pick and choose the files we want to use. While learning about the standard conventions for directory structure in Jekyll sites, we'll also learn about Sass — Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets — and how Jekyll will turn them into standard CSS. It's a bit of a heavy lift in terms of a lot of moving pieces, but no one bit of this was hard to learn. It was great fun, and this is just the beginning of what we're going to learn about using Jekyll as a fully-functional content management system.

Way back in September of 2022, Bart finished off the Webpack miniseries by leaving it as an exercise for the student to deploy their web apps to GitHub Pages. Bart closes that circle in this installment while teaching us how to use GitHub Actions. We learn about workflows, jobs, steps, events, and runners. Bart includes great tables in the shownotes of the terminology, so we now have a handy reference guide for making our own YAML files to run GitHub actions. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2025_02_15 Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and check out the Programming By Stealth channel under #pbs. Support Bart by going to lets-talk.ie and pushing one of the big blue support buttons. Referral Links: Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me Backblaze - One free month for me and you Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

In Programming By Stealth this week, Bart has started a new miniseries to teach us how to use GitHub Pages to create a website (for free.) In PBS 175, he starts by explaining what Static Site Generators (like GitHub Pages) are, and the pros and cons vs. a more traditional content management system like WordPress. Neither are wrong, they just solve the same problem in different ways. He then gives us the framework for the tools we'll be using and lays out the next few lessons where we'll get in and get our hands dirty. I'm extremely excited about this miniseries and I hope you will be too. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2025_02_01 Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison! Join the Conversation: [email protected] podfeet.com/slack Support the Show: Patreon Donation Apple Pay or Credit Card one-time donation PayPal one-time donation Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle Podfeet 15-Year Anniversary Shirts Referral Links: Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me Backblaze - One free month for me and you Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

As promised, we're back with part 2 of the Powershell Teaser. We pick up where we left off, starting with learning about parameter definitions and the advantages such a structured language affords us, including automatically generated help files and error checking. Bart updated the shownotes to include valuable resource links to take your PowerShell to a higher level. We walk through our plan for 2025, where Bart is going to teach us about GitHub Pages (which power the Programming By Stealth shownotes) and then how to change the style you see with Bootstrap to make it your own. After that we expect to get back to PowerShell but that's a ways down the road so things could change.

Bart Busschots is enamored with the open source shell from Microsoft called PowerShell. His goal was to give us a teaser on this modern shell but there was enough material in his shownotes that we're recording the audio in two halves. Feel free to read ahead in the shownotes if you like, or you can wait till the second installment to read the rest. In this first half, we learn about how Bart begrudgingly started using PowerShell and what made him become such a fan. He walks us through the philosophy and then the structure of commands first. We get to play with a few tiny scripts to illustrate how the "plumbing" works in PowerShell and we learn about how message streams work with data streams. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and check out the Programming By Stealth channel under #pbs. Support Bart by going to lets-talk.ie and pushing one of the big blue support buttons. Referral Links: Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me Backblaze - One free month for me and you Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

In a very unusual Tidbit episode of Programming By Stealth, Allison interviews NosillaCastaway and Programming By Stealth student Steve Mattan about how he's running Large Language Models locally on his Mac. He pulls this off using a series of open source tools, starting with Ollama for the models from the command line, and then Enchanted to give him a nice GUI. He explains how he's integrated the local LLM into VSCode for his coding, and how he uses Keyboard Maestro to launch all of this at once. You can find the outline and links to how Steve's doing this at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2024_12_07 Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison! Join the Conversation: [email protected] podfeet.com/slack Support the Show: Patreon Donation Apple Pay or Credit Card one-time donation PayPal one-time donation Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle Podfeet 15-Year Anniversary Shirts Referral Links: Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me Backblaze - One free month for me and you Setapp - One free month for me and you Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart completes his miniseries on Git Submodules. Last time he created an imaginary company with three developers and went through three relatively simple scenarios where Git submodules were implemented. In this finale installment, he takes it up a notch in complexity and we actually get to push submodule changes. The path is fraught with danger and I get stuck on the very last scenario but Bart wouldn't let me give up and eventually helped me understand. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2024_12_07 Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison! Join the Conversation: [email protected] podfeet.com/slack Support the Show: Patreon Donation Apple Pay or Credit Card one-time donation PayPal one-time donation Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle Podfeet 15-Year Anniversary Shirts Referral Links: Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me Backblaze - One free month for me and you Setapp - One free month for me and you Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

In PBS 172 Bart Busschots explained what Git submodules are and the kinds of problems they solve. In this practical lesson, he walks us through three scenarios where we actually get to type in Git commands to learn how the process works. We get to pretend we're in a small web app business where company branding is important. In the first scenario, we're a new developer joining an app team and we have a repo that already includes the branding submodule. In the second scenario, we're a seasoned developer on the team creating a new app and we need to import the branding submodule. Finally, in the third scenario, we're one of the brand designers and we want to update the branding. In the third scenario we learn two different ways to incorporate the branding changes into our web apps. I'm always happy when I get to play along in the Terminal, so this lesson was great fun. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and check out the Programming By Stealth channel under #pbs. Support Bart by going to lets-talk.ie and pushing one of the big blue support buttons. Referral Links: Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me Backblaze - One free month for me and you Setapp - One free month for me and you Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude