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I’ve been using IRC for almost 30 years now. It’s an easy way to connect socially with like-minded people from all over the world. It’s an old protocol with most clients just as old. As my needs have changed over the years I’ve struggled to find a setup that I’m truly comfortable with.

But now, I’ve got a setup that I’m really happy with. And it’s pretty straightforward:

• WeeChat running on linux
• Glowing Bear on my laptop and my phone connected to WeeChat
• WeeChat Relay opened securely to the internet via Caddy
• A script that auto-disconnects me from servers when I’ve been idle for more than an hour

WeeChat

WeeChat is a very powerful IRC client. And unlike a lot of the other IRC clients, it still has active development and maintenance from its community.

I recently needed to copy a few small text files into a container running in AWS Fargate. I assumed it would be an easy matter of copying it through the terminal session, but that is, unfortunately, not the case.

I was accessing the containers via the aws ecs execute-command --interactive --comand "bash" mechanism. If you’re not familiar, this is a quick way to get a terminal inside an ECS container running in any cluster. It’s especially helpful when you have containers that do not receive incoming traffic from the internet. It is almost like SSH, but it is not exactly SSH. And one of the limitations is that there is no equivalent to scp. There is also no ability to forward ports, so you can’t use it to access SSH either.

I have a Windows workstation sitting under my desk at home. This is where I do all of my professional development. I like this setup because it keeps my work completely separate from my personal stuff. If I’m honest, though, my main reason for buying it was because I poured a glass of water over my development laptop. But now that I have it, I highly recommend it.

When I’m working at home, I connect to this workstation using Remote Desktop (RDP). It’s a fantastic protocol for accessing a Windows machine across a network. It’s built in to the operating system, and it’s generally pretty smooth. Most times I can’t even tell that I’m using it.

For various reasons, I’ve had to set up new computers a few times lately. This is still a time-consuming task that I try to avoid, but as I’ve been automating more and more of the process, it’s getting faster and more consistent. This post is essentially a note to my future self, or any colleagues that want to use this as their baseline for their own setups.

Many of the tools I use are free and open source, but some of them are not. Make sure to review and purchase licences where you need to. I’ve used most of these things fairly heavily, and am comfortable recommending all of them. It’s also easy to remove anything you don’t want to use.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is an old text-based chat system that, while seemingly in decline, still has many users around the world. It’s not as convenient as modern alternatives, but for those of us that are familiar with it, and especially those of us that have friends there, it’s still a very viable way to communicate.

There are a number of IRC clients available. On windows, mIRC is popular and easy to set up, but it shows its age. IRCCloud is very convenient, especially if you want to use a mobile device, but it lacks some common features, and you are limited to two servers on the free account. There are other options, of course, but they all have limitations.

Back in September Google announced that Google Podcasts will be shut down. It is supposed to remain available until April of 2024 and be available for exporting data until June. I chose not to wait.

I have been using Spotify happily for music for years now, so I decided to give it a try. I didn’t do any research or look for other options. I had some confidence that it would be a reasonable option however because Spotify has been putting a lot of effort and money into its podcast offering.