How-To on tigger.dev

DIY Audiobooks with make-audiobook

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 14:28:52 +0000

For six months in 2022, I stared at a hospital ceiling. Paralysed from the neck down, audiobooks weren't a luxury—they were my lifeline to the outside world.

That experience taught me something important: access to audio content shouldn't depend on whether a publisher has bothered to record it, whether you can afford the audiobook price, or whether you're willing to hand your reading habits to a cloud service.

The Problem

Most ebook-to-audio tools I found fell into three camps: cloud-based services that upload your books to someone else's servers, complex setups requiring GPU clusters and Python dependency hell, or clunky commercial software with subscription fees.

A file renaming tool for humans

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I deal with a lot of PDFs. Medical invoices, insurance correspondence, bank statements, tax documents—they all arrive with names like e134-a1cf-4b4b-af65-ccf83c5270cb.pdf or Document(3).pdf or, my personal favourite, scan.pdf. Every. Single. Time.

So I started renaming files to something like 2025-09-30-125.00-rahona-clinic.pdf. Now I know what it is without opening the thing - an invoice, with the date and amount right there in the name. I'm halfway to the spreadsheet already. And thanks to ISO date format, they sort nicely too.

Setup & Harden a Linux Server in 2026

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you spin up a fresh Linux box today, it's not "new" for long. The moment it's reachable, it's being scanned, prodded, and occasionally hammered by automated traffic. That's not paranoia, it's just the background noise of the modern internet. Honeypot data has been consistent for years: a brand-new instance with a public IP will typically see its first SSH probe within minutes, and credential-stuffing attempts shortly after.

Cloud providers have made it trivially easy to create compute instances. What they haven't done is make them safe by default. You still get a general-purpose system with a wide attack surface, and it's on you to reduce that surface before you put anything meaningful on it.

Using Git Submodules with Local Overrides

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Managing your own libraries as Git submodules can be awkward: normally, you'd have to push and pull between different directories to keep everything in sync.

But there's a handy trick: keep the submodule pointing at your public remote (for others who clone your project), while locally overriding the submodule's URL to use your own local checkout. This way you get fast iteration, and others still have a smooth experience.

Image manipulation from the command line

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 18:17:43 +0100

Get an image's resolution

$ magick identify going-fishing.jpg
going-fishing.jpg JPEG 5422x3648 5422x3648+0+0 8-bit sRGB 12.2217MiB 0.000u 0:00.003

Convert an image to a different format

$ magick convert going-fishing.jpg going-fishing.png

Resize an image

$ magick convert going-fishing.jpg -resize 800x600 going-fishing-resized.jpg

Only specify width or height

$ magick convert going-fishing.jpg -resize 800x going-fishing-resized-width.jpg
$ magick convert going-fishing.jpg -resize x600 going-fishing-resized-height.jpg

By percentage

$ magick convert going-fishing.jpg -resize 50% going-fishing-resized-percent.jpg

Crop an image

$ magick convert going-fishing.jpg -crop 800x600+100+100 going-fishing-cropped.jpg

Rotate an image

$ magick convert going-fishing.jpg -rotate 90 going-fishing-rotated.jpg

Add a border to an image

$ magick convert going-fishing.jpg -bordercolor black -border 10x10 going-fishing-bordered.jpg

Add text to an image

$ magick convert going-fishing.jpg -gravity South -pointsize 36 -fill white -annotate +0+10 "Going Fishing" going-fishing-text.jpg

Convert an image to grayscale

$ magick convert going-fishing.jpg -colorspace Gray going-fishing-grayscale.jpg

Create a thumbnail

$ magick convert going-fishing.jpg -thumbnail 150x150 going-fishing-thumbnail.jpg

Combine multiple images into a single image

$ magick convert image1.jpg image2.jpg image3.jpg +append combined-horizontal.jpg
$ magick convert image1.jpg image2.jpg image3.jpg -append combined-vertical.jpg

Watermark an image

$ magick convert going-fishing.jpg watermark.png -gravity southeast -geometry +10+10 -composite going-fishing-watermarked.jpg

Watch Youtube with Auto-Translated Captions

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 22:13:49 +0100

Instructions for Subtitles in English

How to get English (or any other language!) subtitles auto-generated while watching a video in another language

On the Youtube video you'll see a little button that looks like a "gear" with cogs, something you might see if you opened up an old wrist watch :)

Click this, then choose Subtitles:

Here you can see three options, click Auto-Translate:

Now you will have to scroll down to find English … or whatever your preferred language is! Danish is in there, even Irish!

Bulk delete bookmarks in Microsoft Word

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 03:26:57 +0100

When I convert from orgmode to Word via Open Document format, I often find the document is littered with superfluous bookmarks. These don't really do much of anything in Word, but if you share it further and someone opens it with Google Workspace vis Gmail or Google Drive, you find the doc has become a big ugly morass where you can barely read the doc. Thanks Google.

In Word's Developer tab, click on Visual Basic to open the VBA editor. In the editor, go to Insert > Module to create a new module. Then add the following code:

Firefox: disable autofill in forms

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 11:23:46 +0100

How to disable autofill (or autocompletion) in Firefox forms

For some reason they don't make this so straightforward any more.

Just go to about:config and set

browser.formfill.enable = false
browser.formfill.expire_days = 1
services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.formfill.enable = false

There's a suggestion that setting browser.formfill.expre_days to 0 is more secure for expiring existing saved data, however 0 often means never expire. Without looking at the code, I'm just going to err on the (to my mind) safer bet of setting it at 1.

Filtering and searching in hledger

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 03:45:29 +0000

I am an advocate of plaintext accounting, and hledger is my go-to tool for this. A good summary of WTF and why on their landing page. All of the various bank accounts and cards I use have some sort of CSV or XML export function. Feeding these in to hledger gives me a powerful direct view on my finances that I can analyze in aggregate for budgeting and planning, but also zoom in to a specific transaction or range of transactions.

Auto-Deploy Hugo from Github

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 10:17:46 +0000

GitHub is pretty good with out-of-box options for auto-deploying Hugo or Jekyll sites to GitHub Pages. But say you have your own VPS (e.g. Linode) - you can still take advantage of GitHub Actions which is a surprisingly versatile piece of CI/CD automation to rival anything you can do on the big cloud providers.

Or, if you just want to deploy to GitHub Pages, the out-of-box workflows that GitHub will create for you in the UI will hard-code a few things that you really don't want hard-coded, such as the Hugo version (you always want to take advantage of the most recent dot-release, for security reasons if nothing else.) I have provided an example below that should remedy this issue.

Firefox: Vertical tabs are here!

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

With the demise of Arc Browser, fear not, vertical tabs are finally here in Firefox (with a little help).

It's built and deployed, just not yet set loose on the masses. But all it needs is a little tweak.

Go to about:config
set sidebar.verticalTabs to true
questionable: sometimes setting sidebar.revamp to true is also necessary, but in my case it was automatically set.

Voilà! Vertical tabs

Resize the tab area with mouse to see tab names, adjust to taste.

Firefox: How to add a search engine manually

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Mostly you can add to your list of search engines just right-clicking. Why bother? Well, maybe you have a niche default search preference, but also it's extraordinarily handy for setting up shortcuts IMHO.

Example: add YouTube to Firefox as a search engine

Go to YouTube
Right-click the URL

Right-click menu on YouTube URL in Firefox

Now you'll find YouTube in Firefox settings:

YouTube search engine in Firefox Search settings

If you give it keyworkd y for example, now when you type y laika party in the search bar, you'll get the YouTube search results for "laika party".