Tomas Vik

Posts

CSS Week 2 - Grid and Flexbox

Grid and Flexbox are standards for positioning elements on the site. I’ve spent a week learning about them and then documented my learning.

CSS Week 1 - Selectors

What did I learn about selectors? What are the tricks of selecting elements you can use?

Learning CSS in two months

TL;DR: To improve my shallow knowledge of CSS, I’m going to learn CSS for roughly eight hours each week for eight weeks. Once a week I’ll write a report about what I’ve learnt. In the end, I expect to be able to predict how CSS change affects the page. This article is for engineers interested in improving their CSS skills. Backend to Frontend by Ljubica Petkovic I want to position an SVG image in line with a text.

How to be less gullible

I trust people. I trust strangers, news on the internet, and books. 90% times, this is a good strategy, but 10% is still worth considering. This article will explain why people are more likely to trust than to distrust and, more importantly, how we can improve our critical thinking. Illustration by Ljubica Petkovic I clearly remember a scene from America’s Got Talent. This sketchy magician1 introduced himself and said he used to be Marilyn Manson’s roommate.

Making a switch from Dropbox to Nextcloud

Instead of a new year’s resolution, I’ve done a new year’s cleaning in 2021. My Dropbox subscription is about to expire in early February, and I had to decide whether I want to keep paying $120 for Dropbox or try something new. And so the first month of the year became a period of digital cleansing. Illustration by Ljubica Petkovic My history with Dropbox I’ve been a Dropbox user since uni, and for the last four years, I’ve been paying for Dropbox Plus.

I want a local-first calendar

I’m at the peak of my degoogling, slowly migrating of Gmail. I still use Google calendar, but hopefully, there’s an alternative. My personal calendar is much less collaborative than my work calendar. I don’t share it with friends, and I don’t use it to organise meetings. That makes it a perfect candidate for a local-first app. Storing my calendar on my devices and synchronising it through services like Dropbox or git.

Why is email so hard? Unsatisfactory migration from Gmail to Zoho

I’ve just tried to get off Gmail. After a long twelve years, I decided it’s time to do what I preach and remove one more dependency on Google. I’ve already done that with YouTube, TL;DR: Zoho Mail as an email provider, Thunderbird and K-9 as clients. But it is a pain. Illustration by Ljubica Petkovic I was sick of sharing my data with Google. I was sick of having a username that I made up in my late teens (still better than the previous two: little.

The things that make me happy

In the last post, I got excited about getting a pot for my birthday. I got positive feedback (thanks Ben) and thought that I might list nine items that I often use and that make my life better. 100% Cotton sweatpants Being in comfortable clothes is underestimated. Since I moved out to go to uni, I wore jeans or chinos at all times. I thought that sweatpants are only for rappers, hardcore slavs and gym junkies.

I got a pot for my last birthday!

Socks, underwear and now a cooking pot! Why are these the best presents? The answer is: I use these things every day, and so even a small improvement in quality makes a difference in the quality of my life. Credit: Tescoma official site This is a rare Tuesday edition of my Sunday article. :) I’ve got plenty of pots and pans, but most of them are low-end level Ikea cookware.

How long will your data last before it gets lost or destroyed

My generation is the last that doesn’t have their whole life electronically documented. When I started going to school, only two of my classmates had a computer. My digital life started roughly at age fifteen. So half of my life is digitally documented. But the question is for how long? I recently found out my docx password-locked diary. I was able to guess the password (the one password I always used before using a password manager1).