Habits

Habits: Challenge 01: Food Log

As originally posted on the Habits.MarkJacobsen.net blog (2 weeks ago – apparently I forgot to hit publish over here)…

Ok, here’s the first 66 day challenge/habit… Log everything you eat and the time of day. Doesn’t matter if you take photos of everything, write it down electronically, on paper, or do some combination, but by the end of the day have 1 consolidated list of everything you ate – including those little snack size Snickers I know you’re eyeing – seeing as it is near Halloween and all 🙂

Now, do that for 66 days. Every day. Every thing you eat (and drink).

See, super easy! I’m not even asking you to change anything about what you eat or drink. Just write it all down. Now, this may be simple for some, but if you’re like me I’ve tried to do this time and again. Usually by about the 4th day I miss something, then just say “ah, what’s the use” and quit.

Using HabitShare this is actually pretty easy – as I’ve been piloting it for a couple days. On any day, you can tap the circle for the day, then just click the triple ellipse “…”, I select the “Empty” icon at the start of the day, add your entry to the text area, and save. At the end of the day, just set the status to “Success” (the green check) if you’ve logged everything. You can even setup multiple reminders throughout the day so that you have a little tickler. For me I have 3 reminders for my “Log Food” habit scheduled at 7:15am, 12:30pm, and 7:15pm.

Now, obviously this is setting us up for future challenges, but for now the goal is to get in the habit of tracking and logging something daily. As I mentioned, don’t worry about analyzing or adjusting now unless you truly get the itch. Just build the logging/tracking habit.

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Challenges, Habits

Habits: Return of the Challenge

As originally posted on the Habits.MarkJacobsen.net blog…

So it’s been a few years since my last series of challenges, and a few things have changed since then 🙂

For one, as posted yesterday, I’m now using HabitShare to track my habits and that’s where anyone that wants to participate in these new set of challenges can share their progress as well. Just be sure to let me know what email address you signed up under or look me up in the app to share.

Also, between reading things like Atomic Habits and The One Thing, the challenges will be a little longer (66 days to be exact) in an effort to make the habit a little more ingrained, but feel free to work on them as long as you see fit. That said, my plan is to start a new challenge monthly until I run out of ideas or fall off the bandwagon – which is why I’m hoping some of you will join in – to make the journey a little more fun.

Now, don’t worry, I realize the holidays are coming up which is why the first few challenges will be relatively easy to get you in the habit of following a habit on a daily basis.

Hope to see you on the journey!

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Habits

Habits: Habit Tracking

As originally posted on the Habits.MarkJacobsen.net blog…

I’ve used habit tracking apps off and on for years to try and get my life in order. The last one I tried, Coach.me, seemed to hold promise, but then they switched their model to be more coaching centric and less focused around social sharing. Plus, let’s be honest… I fell off the bandwagon a bit myself.

Anyway, I recently started considering getting into coaching, but still wanted to find something that would be more social and flexible in terms of being able to share certain things with some people and not others – as well as not locked into sharing 50% of your income.

Well, I think I may have found that app. It’s called HabitShare. Check it out on the App Store of your choice or start by visiting https://habitshareapp.com/

Once you’ve installed it, let me know if you’re interested in joining any of my 66 day challenges, or want some free coaching on a habit of your choice! It’s my treat as I see if it’s something I want to do on an ongoing basis, and so I can build up my skills.

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Financial

2018 Financial Freedom Lessons With Scott & Mindy

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If you want to get a years worth of podcast content in 1 show, this is the one to listen to.

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Programming

Selling the Investment to Pay Down Technical Debt: The Code Christmas Tree

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I meant to post this over the holidays, but still think it’s relevant. Personally, I like the prominent visual aspect of the idea.

Selling the Investment to Pay Down Technical Debt: The Code Christmas Tree | Agile AllianceLike this? Consider joining my mailing list, or at least using my affiliate link when buying from Amazon 🙂

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Programming

Yes, Cross-functional Teams — but Real Ones!

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As we work through the process this seemed pertinent (emphasis is mine)…

The next leap is bringing these different units together (not only through the interface of the Product Owner) to form teams that are actually as knowledgeable about business, contracts, mathematics, sales, marketing, and everything else that is relevant for the company’s value stream as they are in software. For the Scrum teams, the leap means that they can’t “hide” behind their backlog or the Product Owner and need to explore and learn about the market, their customers, and the company’s value stream themselves. Basically it means that now the Agile teams’ focus is beyond software.

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Financial

How to Retire Forever on a Fixed Chunk of Money

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It’s at least worth considering.

The absolute key to success in early retirement, and indeed most areas of life, is to get the big picture approximately right and not sweat the small stuff. And design the big picture with a generous Safety Margin, which allow lots of slop and mistakes in your original forecasts and allows you to still come out with a surplus.

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Linux

Use SCP to copy files between remote and local hosts

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So you need to copy a file you have on a remote server locally, or send a local file to a remote server? Fortunatally, it’s pretty easy with scp. Here’s an example to copy a remote server to the local machine.

scp -P 65124 remoteuser@remotehost:/var/lib/path/to/file.txt /var/lib/path/to/

…which will connect to “remotehost” on port 65124 as “remoteuser” and copy the /var/lib/path/to/file.txt on “remotehost” to the local /var/lib/path/to/ directory.

Need to copy a local file to a remote host? Just switch the parameters up!

scp -P 65124 /var/lib/path/to/file.txt remoteuser@remotehost:/var/lib/path/to/
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Linux

Set a proxy and carry over the values to sudo

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If you’ve ever been behind an enterprise proxy server and needed to reach things on the outside, you probably know how frustrating it is to try and just use your normal commands for something as simple as a wget. So, to get started you will need to know the URL and port for your proxy server, but once you have that, start by editing your .bashrc and add the following (setting proxyhost, the port, and adjusting “no_proxy” as appropriate)…

function proxyon(){
     echo -n "password (for proxy): "
     read -es password
     export http_proxy="http://$USER:$password@proxyhost.com:8181/"
     export HTTP_PROXY=$http_proxy
     export https_proxy=$http_proxy
     export HTTPS_PROXY=$http_proxy
     export ftp_proxy=$http_proxy
     export rsync_proxy=$http_proxy
     export no_proxy="localhost,127.0.0.1,localaddress,.localdomain.com,.domain.com"
     echo -e "\nProxy environment variable set."
}
function proxyoff(){
     unset HTTP_PROXY
     unset http_proxy
     unset HTTPS_PROXY
     unset https_proxy
     unset FTP_PROXY
     unset ftp_proxy
     unset RSYNC_PROXY
     unset rsync_proxy
     echo -e "\nProxy environment variable removed."
}

# remove next line if you don't want to set proxy automatically on login
proxyon

Now you can turn your proxy on and off with the “proxyon” and “proxyoff” commands, but that doesn’t help you when you try to install something with yum or apt that requires sudo. To carry over the proxy values, you’ll need to “sudo visudo” and add the “Defaults” line like shown below…

###############################################
# DO NOT ADD ANYTHING FROM HERE TO END OF FILE #
#
#includedir   /etc/sudoers.d
#
# DO NOT ADD ANYTHING ABOVE THIS LINE###########
Defaults env_keep = "http_proxy https_proxy HTTP_PROXY HTTPS_PROXY ftp_proxy"

… and now, hopefully you are all set.

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Linux

Configure a Static IP in Ubuntu 18.04

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As with all things Linux there’s a million ways to do things, and every brilliant release comes up with a new way to do the same old things in a “better” way. Can you tell I’m be sarcastic yet? Good.

Anyway, after spending over an hour trying to get a freakin static IP on my desktop box I thought I’d share in case it saved anyone hours of their life.

My simple goal was to provide a static IP. Nothing more. Nothing less. Well, the “better” way of doing it now appears to be with “netplan”, and unless you enjoy banging your head against the wall, just create/edit this file and replace with the network interface (enp3s1), IP (192.168.20.55) and gateway (192.168.20.1) of your choice (this config appears to use the DNS servers from the router w/ DHCP turned on). Oh yeah, and don’t bother with the GUI based configuration tool, because apparently they’re not connected at all, and using this will force the config from this file (you’ve been warned and saved hours)

sudo nano /etc/netplan/01-networkd.yaml

# this is the actual file content
network:
  version: 2
  renderer: networkd
  ethernets:
    enp3s1:
      dhcp: no
      addresses: [192.168.20.55/24]
      gateway4: 192.168.20.1
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