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Create a Custom Font Subset with Just the Glyphs You Need

Imagine you’re sprucing up your website. You want crisp, scalable icons for RSS, Twitter, Instagram, and/or GitHub. You are no designer and you don’t want to mess around creating SVGs, so you opt for a symbol font - an excellent choice if I do say so myself. But then you realise it’s a whopping 900KB and includes glyphs for just about everything under the sun. All you need a handful of symbols, maybe SVGs were not such a bad idea after all…

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I’ll admit that I am lazy, have a terrible memory and generally fit the archetype of the grug brained developer. As such I endeavour to make my life as easy as possible, ideally with as little effort as possible. Usually this manifests as me doing some work up front to make my life easier later on, and in fact this has turned out to be a corner stone of my my career to some extent, essentially automating myself out of a job is my job (or at least a good part of it).

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Or, How to Send Status Message from GitHub Actions to Telegram: A Guide

I occasionally find myself wanting a quick and easy way to send alerts and status message and a solution I keep coming back to is using a Telegram bot. Telegram is free to use, reliable and easy to setup. It only takes a few minutes to set up the a bot and fire of a test message using curl. From there you can start sending messages from just about anything that can make an HTTP request. (The same cannot be said for WhatsApp or Signal, which are considerably more complex to setup)

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Very occasionally I write articles or long form notes around some idea or piece of technology that I want to think more deeply about, this is one of those notes that I managed to organise into a post, this time exploring the time honoured double Linked List data structure.

A doubly linked list is a data structure that contains a collection of nodes, each of which holds references to both the previous and next nodes in the list. In addition to these references, each node contains some data (or a reference to some data). The two references (or links) to the previous and next nodes are what give this data structure its name.

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This guide assumes you already have a Proxmox host, at the time of writing v8.2 was current, which is what I used. It also assumes you have a basic Ubuntu 24.04 VM running on that host. If not, you should set that up first. The VM can be fairly minimal; for example, 8GB of storage and 1GB of RAM should more than suffice.

It also assumes you have a USB Storage device that you want to use for backing up macOS using Time Machine.

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