daniebker

De-Googling Your Android Phone: What Are Your Options?

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You can remove the Google apps from your Android phone. Disable them. Delete your Google accounts from the device. But, you’re still locked into Google. Most Android ROMs ship with Google services running in the background, and you can’t turn them off. These services connect to Google’s servers and run diagnostics and reporting on your phone. If you want to opt out, you need to switch to a de-googled ROM. A few good options exist, depending on your phone model.

I tried daily driving Ubuntu Touch for 30 days

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I Gave Ubuntu Touch 30 Days. It Lasted One.

I had a plan to run Ubuntu Touch on my Fairphone 5 for a full 30 days. I’d heard it runs great on that hardware, and to be fair, it does. The OS itself is smooth on the Fairphone. But, I cracked after a single day. Too many things that were core to how I actually use a phone were missing, broken, or just didn’t work at all.

Pens I can't live without

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200

I have a couple of favourite pens. Some I carry with me everywhere I go, and some that almost make it everywhere I go.

Rotring 600 3-in-1

This is my go-to pen — it goes everywhere with me. I like having the choice of two inks and a pencil all in one, and it writes super smooth on almost any paper. The brass finish ages really well too. My one gripe is that you can’t easily glance down and tell which colour you’re on.

Review: Hama Action ON3 wireless earbuds

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200

For budget earbuds, these are surprisingly good. The sound is the pleasant surprise: it’s reasonably balanced and doesn’t fall into the trap most cheap earbuds do of drowning everything in muddy bass.

You do get what you pay for in build quality, though. The buds feel cheap and plasticky, and they rattle around in the case like a pair of maracas when you’re walking. The case itself is flimsy too — the hinge is loose and pops open a bit too easily, which doesn’t inspire confidence with them loose in a bag.

Raspberry Pi5 Claude Code Dev Machine

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 22:48:00 +0200

My Raspberry Pi 5 Dev Station Setup

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. The Pi 5 is genuinely fast enough to use as a real development machine — not a toy, not a learning board, but something you can actually point Claude Code at and get work done. So I set one up as a headless SSH dev station, and this is what I installed and why.

Default workinghours in taskjuggler

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 14:30:23 +0000

I have this fascination with wanting to visualise how long I think a project will take. I’ve been trying to use ox-taskjuggler and org-mode to do this for years and today I finally, with the help of AI, cracked it.

Taskjuggler has a default workinghours schedule of mon - fri 09:00-17:00 to allocate resources outside of that time you need to override the default and set the resources workinghours. The main goal for me is to be able to see on a timescale just how long I think a project will take if I commit to working on it 1 hour a week. By using ox-taskjuggler and org-mode I can do just that. This is a nice to have and shouldn’t really be needed for personal projects, I know. But, sometimes you just have an itch that needs scratching

org-super-links

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 16:28:23 +0000

I always struggled to get the hang of org-roam and I’m not a fan of everything in it’s own contained files. Having things in a large file seemed to go against the grain of the system. Instead what I really wanted was to easily back link between certain nodes. Today I learned this is easily doable with org-super-links¹

Basically it creates a backlink in a property draw to any file headings that are linking to this heading. I don’t need to be able to link to headings and then view them in a fancy graph, but I do want to remember where else I stumbled across this information, or where it may be linked to.

Kiss

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) is my favourite design principle. I use it for everything I build and even in everyday life. The principle says it all, keep it as simple as you can. In practice I’ve done this with a few projects recently. The landing page for my new site slowwwtech.com is as simple as a single html file with a font and some basic css. And, my new commonplace site commonplace.daniebker.co.uk is just a hugo site with a very basic custom theme¹ and a few custom css rules. The commonplace site has grown as I needed to link between pages or add backlinks. Frameworks are only added as needed and I try to keep the stack as minimal as possible. My commonplace site actually started out as a single markdown using pandoc to convert it to html. Only when linking between pages became necessary did I add hugo to the mix.

Now

Wed, 22 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is a now page. It details exactly what I’m focused on at this time of my life.

Last updated [2025-05-06] from my home in Spain.

Reading

Meditations for Mortals

Short book from Oliver Burkeman that’s laid out in the form of a 28 day plan to help break some of the productivity tropes you can fall into.

The Unconsoled

I’ve read a few Kazuo Ishiguro books and this is the most surreal. It is a dreamlike narrative that is kind of hard to follow. It pulls you in as the main character seems to get dragged deeper and deeper into the absurdity.

How to: Tailwindcss animated progress bar

Wed, 22 May 2024 00:00:00 +0200

As part of a project I’m working on I wanted to add an animated progress bar for some visual stimulation in the page. Since I’m using tailwindcss I was easily able to create a progress bar but I was struggling to get it to animate using the solutions I found on stackoverflow.

In the end I settled on adding a custom animate-progress class and attaching some keyframes to it starting the width from 0.

Running a SvelteKit app in Docker

Mon, 06 May 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Getting SvelteKit to work in a docker environment is pretty straight forward, you just need to change a configuration option first to build the application for your environment.

This example assumes you already have a working SvelteKit app. The steps in this article work on an application created using the Getting Started guide in the svelte kit docs. Following the same steps should work for this article.

Once you have a SvelteKit app running locally we’re ready to start preparing the docker image. In this guide I’m going to be using node as the environment.

Cleaner Code as a Solo Dev

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Lately I’ve been trying to refresh my CPP skills by building a game. Part of the problem that I’m having is it’s been a good 10 years since I worked in CPP and a lot has changed since then. When I first started the game I was using raw pointers. I quickly switched to smart pointers but there’s still some aspects of the code using raw pointers. That’s just one example where I started a bad habit without realising it, and I’m still paying the price. The problem is when you’re learning a new language solo you don’t always know when you’re writing dirty code, since you have no one reviewing it.

Enable exceptions in emscripten with cmake

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

I’ve been working on a game in cpp recently and one of the things I’ve wanted to try is compiling the game to WASM. The template I started from included an emscripten build, but in my haste to get things done I broke it. This week though I fixed that and can happily report that the web build is up and working.

One issue I ran into is that my cpp build throws exceptions when you want to do something ‘impossible’. Out of the box this isn’t enabled in emscripten, though from playing the game it’s not entirely obvious what’s going on. Every now and again the game was freezing and unresponsive. It wasn’t until I made the connection that it was only freezing when something impossible was happening that I had something to look up. Turns out, when compiling and linking, without the correct flags emscripten won’t enable exceptions. The emscripten docs are here are clear on this. To support the exceptions with my cmake build I added:

How to back up CDs in 2023

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0200

I’ve slowly started to drift away from using music streaming services. In fact, I’ve moved away from most streaming in general, preferring to take a slower approach to consuming media. Services like Spotify have more choice than I could ever care to want and I often find myself listening to music that I already own on CD or the same albums over and over. I also have a regular habit of picking up music on Bandcamp since the artists that need the streaming money most are least likely to get any of it[1].

Getting doom emacs style keybindings in vscode

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0200

I switched back to Visual Studio Code as my primary code editor. There was too much going on with Emacs, and not being able to understand Elisp code that well, I often found myself copy-pasting snippets in the hope of getting something to work. In the end, the breadth and depth of configuration in Emacs were too far gone for me to build a useful editor out of it.

How to install and setup KeePassXC-Browser on Arc

Mon, 15 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Figure 1: Photo by [FLY:D](https://unsplash.com/@flyd2069) on Unsplash

This last week my lastpass benefit was withdrawn from my work benefits. Our enterprise lastpass subscription included a lastpass families benefit which I was taking advantage of. However, it seems that was removed in cost cutting exercises. Considering trying to move to tech independence I thought it was a great time to checkout open source alternatives. This is where I found KeePass. Essentially KeePass generates a secure file to store your passwords in. This file can then be read by any applications implementing the KeePass API. This is where the sech independence comes in. Although I’m using a single format I’m free to choose how I interact with that file. There’s a ton of options linked on the official site, but I ended up using KeePassXC on mac with the browser extension for Chrome. Since I’m using Arc I thought I’d drop my steps here in case anyone else using Arc Browser was looking for a way to enable the KeePassXC-Browser extension. KeePassXC also works on Linux so I have the added benefit of reusing the same interface across multiple computers.

23-19

Sun, 14 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200

This week in dev…

Tech Independence

Starting to take Tech Independence more seriously. Have my own CalDAV server up and running the last few weeks and that’s serving as my Calendar source and tasks source. I even installed NextCloud on my VPS to start storing small batches of files. I’m actively looking for more things to replace and will continue to do so as time goes by.

My Lastpass subscription came to an abrupt end this week, this was prime time for me to move to something more independent and a good example of relying on one company for a service. Once the service was cut I lost all access to my passwords. I was only able to use them on one device. Yes, I could pay for the plan myself, but then I’m still subject to the whims of a single company. I’d prefer to manage it myself and have the freedom to change my mind quickly if something isn’t working. Thankfully, I was able to easily switch to KeePassXC and the chrome browser extension.

23-17 / This week in Dev

Sun, 30 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Figure 1: Photo by [Kyle Glenn on Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/-f8ssjFhD1k)

This week in my dev life:

Interesting Finds

Solar Protocol
- A network that routes internet traffic according to the logic of the sun, where page requests are sent to whichever server is enjoying the most sunlight at the time.
Derek Sivers Tech independence
- Heard this on the Tim Ferris podcast. Tech independence is not depending on any particular company or software.

Kindle Clip

Added documentation for how to create templates.
Added support for OpenAI. It’s currently using the curie-test-001 model for choosing a title for the highlights. Check it out on the github repo.

General

Updated SSH rules to avoid exposing port 22.
- Not out of any particular need, just because I could.

How To change the default SSH port on a digital ocean droplet

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Figure 1: Photo by [regularguy.eth](https://unsplash.com/@moneyphotos) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/-o90yRQoXAM)

Good security practices can save your ass. If you have a server in the cloud and SSH enabled then you probably have it running on Port 22. Anyone can guess this port and start running a brute force attack. To help mitigate this you can change the SSH port to some random port. This will add an extra barrier to help deter unauthorised access to your server.

How to add new templates in Kindle Clip

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

I love when a product affords me the flexibility to do whatever I want with it. That’s why, in kindle-clip, I added the ability to customise the output format of the kindle clippings. With this new feature the app can output into what ever format you dream up. This level of customization means it’s possible to completely rewrite Amazons format into a format that suites your workflow.

By passing the name of the template in the command line params it’s possible to configure the output format of the highlights and notes. This is useful for writing highlights into a flexible format, or really nailing in a specific template just for your notes. In this post I’ll go over whats currently needed to create a new template.

23-04 / This week in Dev

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Figure 1: Photo by [Andrew Neel](https://unsplash.com/@andrewtneel) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/cckf4TsHAuw)

Hi everyone, Dan here. Here’s my first weekly dev log that I plan to post. Hope you enjoy reading about what I’ve been up to this week.

Added markdown support in Kindle Clip

Refactored a bit how the code works. It’s now possible to setup a template in the directory of the repository and select it from the command line. As a first implementation I added mardown support, you can check that here. Eventually I’ll make kindle clip an npm package, maybe even an executable. It’ll come bundled with some templates but you’ll also be able to set a local directory to supply your own custom templates.

Arc Browser cheat sheet

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Browsing

Binding	Action
`CMD + SHIFT + C`	Copies the current page URL

Tabs

Binding	Action
`CTRL + TAB`	Cycle between open tabs. Tabs are ordered by last visited.
`CMD + [0-9]`	Jumps to tab at the corresponding number. Starts with pinned tabs.

Spaces

Space’s in arc browser are a similar to profiles in Chrome and Firefox. All extensions, bookmarks, logins, cookies, and everything else is specific to that space. One of th emost powerful features of spaces, in my opinion, is being able to choose which space to open a link in when clicked from an external applications. See this video for more info on spaces.

How to view images on a kindle paper white

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Figure 1: Photo by [pinho](https://unsplash.com/es/@pinho) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/es/fotos/r_2MXjhQiQY?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)

I no longer use a smart phone, which in todays app driven world comes with some difficulties. Namely things like etickets and digital membership cards. Currently the LightPhone 2 doesn’t support QR codes or images so I had to come up with an alternative. Since I almost always have my kindle with me I thought I could use that to also carry copies of the QR codes and tickets I would otherwise use a smart phone for.

AI and the future of web searches

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize the way we browse and generate content for the internet. Having used it for a couple of weeks, I believe that it has implications for the websites that ChatGPT crawls to obtain information. In this article, I will specifically discuss the Bing Chat feature, which uses OpenAI technology.

Unfortunately, much of the content on the web today is not primarily created for human consumption. Many blog owners and media outles write articles with the sole purpose of pleasing search engines, hoping to have their content appear on the first page of search results. To achieve this, they often add superfluous content that is irrelevant to the main topic, in the hopes of triggering a search term.

Fixing ø is undefined in xterm

Fri, 27 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today I had one of the most annoying bugs running emacs in tmux. First off was that fact that backspace was always opening the help dialog in emacs. Next was everytime I hit ALT + x I was getting ø is undefined. Googling around I was searching for things like MOD x not working in emacs and coming up way short. Nothing seemed like it was even related to what I wanted to do. Besides, most of the solutions that came up were already settings in my .tmux.conf or I didn’t want to start sprinklink ke modifiers in my emacs conf.

How to setup a tiling window manager on macos

Sun, 15 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been looking for the macos equivalent of i3-gaps for a long time. I love the simplicity a tiling window manager adds by laying out all the windows in a space equally. Combine that with the flexibility to quickly move and resize windows around with the keyboard and everything feels so effortless.

I tried Magnet for a while. Ultimately it fell way short for me. I like the asthetic of small gaps between my windows. It allows everything to breath while maintaining a clean and organised feeling. It also doesn’t use Binary Space Partitioning (BSP), every time I opened a new window in a space it needed to be given it’s own area to occupy. Having to arrange the windows every time using the keyboard short cuts was fine, but an extra step I didn’t want to take. On top of that, resizing windows didn’t force the other windows to resize in the same space which leaves everything feeling super clunky.

org-mode pomodoro

Sun, 17 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

org-pomodoro is an emacs pacakge that adds pomodoro functionality into emacs. By enabling the package and running the command org-pomodoro (SPC t t in doom emacs) the current heading will be clocked in in org mode and a pomodoro timer started. When the pomodoro is up it will also play a notification sound when the session ends and when the break ends.

In doom emacs, enabling org-pomodoro is as simple as enabling the pomodoro module.

Auto starting Syncthing on Linux Mint

Sun, 03 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Enable the service by running.

`1`	`systemctl enable syncthing@myuser.service`

This will enable the service to run as my user as a system wide service.

Then start the service by running

`1`	`systemctl start syncthing@myuser.service`

THe service should then be started. Run:

`1`	`systemctl status syncthing.service`

To check the status of the service. It should return something like:

1
2

Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/syncthing@.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Sun 2021-10-03 21:36:29 CEST; 17min ago

Alpine Linux eeePC

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Today was a public holiday so I decided to crack the old eeePC out and try and set up something useful on it.

I already had a doom emacs and ssh set up so it was just a matter of plugging it in to get going. One of the first things I wanted to do was get it on my tailscale netwrork. Once I had that working I’d be able to ssh into it even when I’m not on my home network. Tailsclae is a breeze to setup.

A better way to enable ox-hugo in Doom Emacs

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

So yesterday in my doom emacs cheatsheet I pushed a snippet on how to setup ox-hugo in doom. Turns out there’s a better way than installing the package and running the require in the config.el. Doom Emacs already supports adding ox-hugo as an option. Fun! So now all I had to do was enable the module. See enabling ox hugo for how to do that.

Special thanks to Brian Wisti for putting that down in a blog post.

Update: Added LastMod to the theme

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0200

I made a fork of the original Paper 5.0 theme I’m using. I’ve updated it to add a new config element which is showLastMod. This enables a new attribute to be shown right below the author of a post that shows the last time the post was modified. For posts this is kind of useful as you can see how outdated the information is in a given post. However, I think it’s helpful most of all in the Doom Emacs Cheatsheet page. Now it’s easier to see how frequently this information is updated and when it was last modified with new, or updated, information.

About

Tue, 31 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a software engineer that loves tinkering.

I design practical, open-source software and hardware through creative hacking that helps people reclaim old tech, automate workflows, and reduce e‑waste.

CV ATTACH

2022: Principal Engineer in the Site Entry Points team. Architecting solutions for the VistaPrint storefront.
2021: Senior Lead Software engineer in the site pages portfolio.
2020: Team lead managing a team of 4 engineers.
2019: Migrating a monolithic website from mostly .net code to React and Gatsby.JS.

03.09.2012: Software Engineer in Vistaprint, Barcelona.

2012: Graduate Staffordshire Univserity with First Class Honors in International Computer Games Programming BSc

Crafting a Doom Emacs cheatsheet

Tue, 31 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m crafting a little cheatsheet as I go through learning doom emacs. It’s linked in the navigation and I’ll be updating it as I go through tutorials and learn new things in doom emacs. The learning curve hasn’t been quite so steep as I was already used to emacs from using it before. Doom Emacs was still new, it took some time getting to grips with evil but I’m geting there.

doom emacs cheat sheet

Tue, 31 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A work in progress Doom Emacs Cheat sheet. Check the original org file on github.

Doom

Commands

`doom sync`

`doom doctor`

Checks for errors in your configuration. Can spot mispelled and duplicate modules in the ~/.doom.d/init.el file as well incorrect flags being passed to modules.

Modules

Doom has a module concept. Modules are a bundle of packages combined into one. Modules are enabled in the ~/.doom.d/init.el file. On initial install many are commented out. If a module you want to use is commented out simply uncomment it, exit doom emacs and run ~/.emacs.d/bin/doom sync before restarting.

My first post

Tue, 31 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Starting, again, this blog. Since my photography contnent no lives over at danbakerphoto.com I feel like I can repurpose this one to my development and personal blog.

I’m fully on emacs again. This time doom-emacs. Despite the initial hicups with evil it’s actually great to use. Emacs is coming back to me slowly. As part of that learning process I’m also documenting the keybindings I frequently need to look up.

Special thanks go out to 南小北 for the Hugo Paper theme which I used to setup this blog in less than 5 minutes.