Today I Learned

Restoring from a Time Machine backup can create duplicate MDM VPN profiles.

To manually remove a profile on your macOS, follow these steps:

• Go to System Preferences and select Profiles.
• Delete the VPN profile, and enter the user password if requested.
• Then, go to Network Connections.
• If you see any connections which start with or include “VPN”, delete them.

Note

If the Button isn’t available,you have to use a terminal command to remove it. Open the integrated Terminal and type

networksetup -removenetworkservice "duplicateVPNProfile"

In order to deploy Nuxt as a static website you need to:

1. Upgrade nuxt to 2.14.0
2. Set target: 'static' in your nuxt.config.js
3. Set fallback 404 page:generate: { fallback: '404.html' }
4. Run nuxt generate

You then need to tell Nginx to properly handle slashes for subpages:

    location /.
    {
        # Remove trailing slash and redirect it
        rewrite ^(.+)/+$ $1 permanent;
        
        # Redirect index.html
        rewrite ^(.+)/index.html$ $1 permanent;
        
        # Serve folder path via index.html
        try_files $uri $uri/index.html =404;
        
        # Serve a custom static error page
        error_page 404 /404.html;
    }

Sometimes you need to follow an url trough multiple redirects. I've created a simple script you can alias into your .bashrc or .zshrc file and then just use it as a regular shell command:

Add this line to .zshrc or .bashrc

# Follow URL
alias checkurl='_checkurl() { curl -v -L $1 2>&1 | egrep "^(> Host:|> GET|> Code|< HTTP|\* SSL)"}; _checkurl'

Then you can use it like so:

checkurl google.com

it will output this:

> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: google.com
< HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: www.google.com
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Really useful when debugging URLs.

For a long time I've been afraid of using the shell command chmod. That because I didn't understand how it works and I feared breaking things. Today though, I learned how easy it is actually. No, not to break things, but to use the chmod command.

A Unix system allows for multiple users with different access rights, which can be changed in the shell by using this command.

The permissions are for reading, writing and executing (rwx) and are expressed for all three types of users a file or folder has. It will come in the form of rwxrwxrwx where the first batch of three characters (rwx), belong to the owner, the second to the group, and the third to all the other users (owner/group/other).

Sure, (rwx rwx rwx) would mean that everybody has all the access rights to that particular file or folder. And we all know that's not a good idea. So, most often you'll see something like rw-r--r-- which means that only the owner has the right to read and write, while everybody else can only read that particular file.

Now onto chmod, which can be used with either a symbolic or a numeric notation for the access settings. You've probably seen somebody else type chmod 644 file_name on your computer, leaving you wondering about what that means.

That's the numeric notation.

If you think about the access rights as a series of bits, the whole thing would look like this:

rwx rwx rwx = 111 111 111
rw- r-- r-- = 110 100 100
rw- r-x --- = 110 101 000

That translates into

rwx rwx rwx = chmod 777
rw- r-- r-- = chmod 644
rw- r-x --- = chmod 650

because in binary notation:

100 = 4
101 = 5
110 = 6
111 = 7

And now you've got a simple rule on how to construct your chmod command depending on what permissions you need to set.

The rwxr--r-- access rights means chmod 744, rw-r----- is chmod 640, and so on.

Simple enough, right?

As a developer, you frequently find yourself in the position when you forgot a certain syntax or you just want to see some quick code snippet to implement certain functionality. No need to google it now, you don't even need to leave your favorite terminal, welcome cheat.sh.

Usage:

curl cheat.sh/programming_language/query_string

curl cheat.sh/python/random+list+elements