Blog

import { YouTube } from '@astro-community/astro-embed-youtube'; I've been a mostly happy [VSCode](https://code.visualstudio.com) user for a few years now. So much so that [I even maintain a couple of extensions for it](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/publishers/ChrisChinchilla). Before VSCode, I loved [Atom](https://atom-editor.cc). And before that… I can't remember anymore. But every now and then, it's good to look into alternatives and see how they compare, what options you haven't considered they offer, and if they bring anything new to your productivity. In this post, I look at seven alternatives to VSCode...

Developers talk a lot about “immutability.” Outside the technical world, it usually means something negative: unmoving, inflexible, and entrenched. However, in the technical field, these features become an advantage and mean that a system is reliable and reproducible. Like many concepts and trends in technology, it’s nothing new. NixOS (more on it later) has existed for over twenty years, and ChromeOS is probably the most widely used immutable operating system (OS). However, the widespread ado...

import { YouTube } from '@astro-community/astro-embed-youtube'; I've been happily using [Parallels Desktop][1] for my Windows and Linux virtual machine needs for about the past three years. It's performant, supports a reasonable variety of guest operating systems, and, with some tweaks, can also run headless developer machines and Kubernetes clusters. However, times are financially lean, so every time I see that recurring fee approaching, I wonder if there are any alternatives. With [VMware m...

Installing and updating applications and other dependencies on a computer really should be a solved problem by now. Yet almost every major desktop operating system provides multiple options, with no real clear answer to “which is best.” Linux, despite long-established package managers such as apt, deb, and rpm, just to name a few, still suffers from confusion and inconsistency between open source vs proprietary instals, as well as between developer tools and more user-focussed tools. Additiona...

import { YouTube } from '@astro-community/astro-embed-youtube'; [JetBrains](https://www.jetbrains.com) is known for its variety of developer-focused IDEs, all based around its IntelliJ core. In recent years, they developed their own writer-focussed plugin, [Grazie](https://www.jetbrains.com/grazie/), for handling grammar and style guidance, [Writerside](https://www.jetbrains.com/writerside/) for a wide variety of tech writing tasks, and more recently, an AI assistant for writers. The company has also helped with community-maintained plugins such as those for [markdown](https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/markdown.html) and [asciidoc](https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7391-asciidoc). But then, a year...

[A few years ago I detailed the hardware and software I use for producing my podcasts and videos](https://chrischinchilla.com/blog/2021/2021-09-07-my-audio-video-production-setup/). Since then, I have changed a lot, so it seemed a good time to revisit. My last post mentioned that I had two setups for video and audio production, my “A” setup in my small office-cum-studio and my “B” setup at home. I almost exclusively use the “A” setup these days, and when I do use the “B” setup, it’s almost identical to what I detailed in the older post. > I spend a lot of time on making conte...

In June, Kubernetes celebrates its tenth birthday. The system is now so widely used by hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide to scale their applications to meet demand it’s hard even to remember a time before it existed. But there was a time when other options were available, and I even remember using some of them.

Who do you think reads most of your technical writing? Customers? Potential customers? If your work is public and not behind a log-in, I hate to disappoint you, but your most frequent reader probably isn’t human. And this is nothing new.

Open source is at a crossroads. For the past few years, venture capital has directly or indirectly paid for many of the contributors and much of the infrastructure it needed to keep going. That was until the past 24 months or so, when funding started to slow down, leading to less internal development or funding resources going toward open source.

How many words do you write every day? Think about it. Every time you send an email, post in Slack, or comment on an Instagram post. Oh, you thought I would mention those wondrous words you pour into your latest novel, blog post, marketing copy, or script?

import { YouTube } from "@astro-community/astro-embed-youtube"; I create a lot of content with audio. Interviews that become final podcasts, final podcasts, videos, and more. In almost all cases, a transcript of that audio is useful. Often, I use it to create a blog post based on that audio, and I am also in the process of creating interactive transcripts for my backlog of podcasts. And that aside, accompanying transcriptions of shows are good for SEO and accessibility. Transcription tools ha...

We had to put our 17-year-old cat to sleep last week. First, why does English have such terrible words for this action? “Putting down”, “putting to sleep”. They are both terrible ways to describe such an action, but I’m not sure I have any better ideas…

Markdown may be popular for its simplicity and “plainness”, but it’s often full of information. Whether for internal or external consumption, that information often contains code snippets for running certain commands or code examples. Wouldn’t it be great if you could run that code directly as you read from within the markdown?

I’ve mentioned before that I have been using Obsidian more and more, and from a knowledge management perspective, it’s fantastic, with a plethora of plugins that extend its functionality to connect to many external services. But as a cross-platform Electron application, integration with the host operating system is one of the places it fails. As the underlying data store is a folder of files, some integration is possible there, but Obsidian has minimal awareness of changes that happen.

I have a past life in music. In the late 1990s, I produced one of the first online fanzines and wrote for several street press magazines in London and Melbourne. In the middle of that, I also played in bands in the UK and Australia, playing guitar and, latterly, drums. And then I stopped. My musical creative spark had run out. Fast forward to about 2021, and it returned, primarily due to relearning the instruments I had always played by “feeling” in the past. Actively learning instruments and p...

I am extremely lucky to have a display problem. I have a small home office and a studio setup. At home, I sometimes have my laptop under my screen and sometimes to the left. In the studio, I have two external screens, one of which I switch to 1080p when recording videos. So that’s four potential screen configurations. I have always found screen configuration on macOS relatively smart and reliable. It tends to remember individual screens and automatically switch to the configuration you last use...

What do American Online, the Apple Newton, DVDs, Tamagochis, MP3, PDF, and Sony Discmans all share in common? They were all products born in (and some dying in) the 1990s. An era I remember vaguely well as I spent most of my mid to late teenage years in it. And now I see the fashions and band T-shirts from that era back on the streets and…

It’s been a few years since I attended Berlin’s Internationale Funkausstellung, better known as IFA. And after several slow years for conferences and trade fairs, capped off with a slowdown in tech and tech-adjacent spending, I was interested to know what the show floor would feel like.

About 18 months ago, I covered my attempts to replace Evernote. I was surprised by how popular that post was and how much feedback it received. Unsurprisingly, I have adapted and changed my setup since then and in this post, I cover what I now use and how I use it. Hopefully, with the same level of readers and feedback 😁.

In this post, I cover how I use Aeon Timeline, an application for building interactive narrative timelines. If you want to read more, then take a look at the post I wrote on the Setapp applications I use regularly.

Welcome to Setapp Month! I have been a user of Setapp for quite a while now, almost ever since the service launched, and I visited Macpaw’s offices in Kyiv, touring their awesome Apple museum and meeting the office cats. Setapp is a macOS and iOS application subscription service, where for $9.99 a month, you get access to dozens of applications, large and small, complex and simple, old favourites and new arrivals.

Generative AI tools and platforms are not just the flavour of the month (for now), they’re the flavour of the year, if not the decade. Many of these are web platforms, and I have always been the first to admit that I prefer good old-fashioned, offline-first native desktop applications. As many of the new wave of services were smart enough to include an API option, this has made it possible for enterprising developers to create any other type of application they want to, including, in the case...

In my previous post I covered my creative writing setup and the post proved quite popular, so I thank everyone who read and left comments for that. Next in this series of posts covering my various setups is my setup for technical writing. In this post I use the term “tech writing” to cover my documentation, blog post, and longer form technical writing work. My technical writing setup is also far more defined and established, with less areas where I am “still deciding” what’s best for me. My set...

Or how Google IO made me realise I probably need to find a new job in 2 years Squeezed into the remodelled Google Berlin old medical school theatre I have a lovely glass of wine ready to go as I attempt to live blog a keynote for the first time in a while. I love watching American keynotes with Europeans, as we are much more… sceptical. One person in the crowd cheered for an announcement once and everyone looked at them like they were crazy. OK, this is all pretty unstructured as I don’t have...

I didn’t attend Detroit last year, but did attend Valencia, and while it was great to be back at a reasonably large in-person event again, the event did feel slightly subdued. I worried that the past few months of leaner times and layoffs for the tech industry might mean that this year’s KubeCon EU might also feel muted for different reasons. I couldn’t be more wrong. I admit that my memory of pre-2020 EU KubeCons (and I’ve been to most of them) is a little hazy, but this year in Amsterdam felt...

In my last post, I looked at the decision process I went through in deciding what to migrate my long time Jekyll-powered website to. I arrived at Astro and in this post I cover my experiences in migrating to and using Astro.

Last week, I stupidly left the apartment to take a stroll with my office keys. As I shut the front door to double lock it and stared at the wrong set of keys in my hands with disbelief, I realised my mistake. To make things worse, I was sick, the weather was foul, and my wife wasn’t due to return from a work trip until late evening. Resolved in the fact that I was stuck with just my wallet and phone for the day, and thanking the stars I had the option to go to the office, I headed in. I wonder...

The docs as code trend, where technical writers and developers work more closely using similar tools and processes, has grown in the past few years. For some tech writers, who come from technical backgrounds, have always worked on technical projects, or were able to pick their toolchain, it's the only workflow we've ever known. Developers use myriad tools and frameworks daily, many of which tech writers will also find useful. One such tool is the IntelliJ-based suite of "integrated developer...

I finally finished my first fiction novel after two years of work and have already begun work on my second. I’ve also produced several short stories and have some game supplements in slow progress. So, as people seem interested in knowing these things, I thought it was about time I shared my setup for creative writing. I specify “creative writing” as I have different tool chains for my different writing activities. You can read more about those in future posts.

Some time ago, [I mentioned a process I tried](https://medium.com/geekculture/migrating-applications-and-data-to-a-new-mac-without-using-time-machine-240e1de77892)that allowed me to partially recreate my Mac setup on another machine with scripts. As part of that process I attempted to add my home folder configuration to version control so that I could keep track of changes to it, and again, use it on other devices if needed. To accomplish this, I made use of three tools mostly, plus several symbolic links and aliases.