Hacks on yozy//NET

NeoVim plugin for visualising sentence length

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I used an LLM to generate the code for this plugin.

I am trying to get better at writing. One of the recommendations I’ve read is that varying the sentence length makes reading more enjoyable. Naturally, I wanted to visualise this while writing. Coloring each sentence according to its length, would make it possible to detect long blocks of same-length sentences; they would be large uniformly colored blobs. Optionally also show the lengths in a sidebar column.

Since I use NeoVim for all of my writing, a Lua plugin would do just fine. So I made one.

Here is how it looks like, when ran on the source code for this very post:

Find it on GitHub jlegeny/vim-prose-flow¹

Although I use Source Hut for all of my code, for Lazy plugins it is much easier to default to GitHub. You can also find the plugin at sr.ht. ↩︎

Journaling on iOS With Shortcuts

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I want to keep a journal, I have three requirements:

The data must be stored as plain text and plain images on disk, that I own.
The entries must be labelled with their creation timestamp, location, and ideally weather information.
I want to be able to create a journal entry from an image. The above metadata should be loaded from the image.

I started journaling with Day One¹. After it got sold I have lost faith in its future. They also use a proprietary database with limited export options which fails my condition 1.

Apple’s Journal looked interesting, but it does not satisfy my conditions 1 and 3.

I looked into self-hosted options:

Journiv² — has a terrible frontend, uses a database instead of markdown, has asinine features like “reflect now” that can not be turned off.
Obsidian — would be great but does not support 3 and requires their paid sync service on iOS.

Diar - iOS shortcuts for authoring journal entries

When I squinted at my requirements I realized that what I need is a Hugo³ blog with a login and different syntax + some goodies, and a couple of iOS shortcuts.

I always start programming by defining my data structures. First, I’ve decided on the syntax of my entries:

Since the only mandatory metadata is the timestamp, the obvious format is a markdown file with the timestamp as filename and the entry in the text.

For the other metadata I wanted something human readable and editable. I didn’t want to use a preamble like Hugo does.

My solution is to add a footer using the --- markdown syntax for a horizontal rule. Then use hashtags for tags, lines starting with /images/ for images, location prefixed by @ and a simply parsed weather. If there is a line that matches neither, it is interpreted as plain text location.

E.g.: in a file named 2006-01-02T150405.md:

This is an entry inside my journal, as you can observe it just starts as a plain text.

You can use markdown. I only really use emphasis and blockquotes.

---
/images/a-nice-illustration.jpg
#rhea #journaling
Home, France
@48.8687162,2.2219584
17°C, Cloudy

All of the footer entries are optional.

It was easy to create two shortcuts in iOS to:

Grab the current location, weather and address and write a new note with current timestamp as filename with this information. Then open the file immediately with iA Writer.
Receive an image, use it’s exif to get the time and location. If the date is today, grab the weather. Copy the image into the desired location, create the note and open it in iA Writer.

The advantage of handling images this way is that iA Writer supports displaying them in preview mode.

For the first use case the shortcut looks like this:

Rhea - Go server to render the journal in a nice way

Since I knew Hugo was almost what I wanted, I decided to learn Go and write my server.

My design goes roughly this way:

Fully server-rendered html page.
No static rendering, live-running server only.
Single user, the login credentials are passed through environment.

The program should do the following.

On startup look into the directory that contains the entries.
Iterate over the entries.
1. If the entry contains an image, generate a thumbnail for it if it hasn’t been done and store it in a cache directory.
2. If the entry contains a location, use MapBox to fetch the map, and store it.
Start watching the entries directory and update the in-memory representation if anything is added or changed.
Start a web server that serves:
1. / - At root show list of the first page of entries, show the location map if the location changed from previous entry by more than 50km. Show images as thumbnails.
2. /after/TIMESTAMP and /before/TIMESTAMP to serve a next/previous page.
3. /memories/TIMESTAMP - Show a detailed entry with full size images and a more detailed location map.
4. /images, /thumbails, /tiles-ZOOM, static - Just serve the files.
5. /login - Render this page if there is no valid session cookie set.

And that’s about it. Cook this with some nice templates and a bit of CSS and we have a journaling app.

If you would like the source code feel free to ask, I am no longer publishing my repositories publicly.

https://dayoneapp.com/ ↩︎
https://www.journiv.com/ - looked promising but the setup is too cumbersome. ↩︎
https://gohugo.io ↩︎

How to Get the Local IP Address of an Apple Watch

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 12:03:48 +0200

The Apple Watch does not display its local IP address in the settings for some reason. Here is one way to get it, if you have a second Mac on the network.

Open terminal on the mac, run python -m SimpleHTTPServer.
Get your Mac’s local IP address (option+click on the network icon in the toolbar).
Send yourself an iMessage with text http://YOUR_MACS_IP:8000.
Turn WiFi off on your iPhone. This is important because the Apple Watch can use your phone’s WiFi.
Open Messages on your watch, find the message, tap on the link.

In the terminal on your Mac you will see something like 192.168.0.21 - - [12/Oct/2021 12:00:00] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 -.

And there you have your Watch’s IP address.

CSS Classes in Pure Markdown

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 08:00:00 +0200

One of Markdowns design choices is to not implement any layout.

Problem

One thing I wish it had would be a way of specifying image positions. E.g.: float on right and have width equal to the third of the column. Just like the example illustration somewhere next to this text.

Markdown does support plain html tags, so a verbatim <img> tag would be a solution. I find this inelegant, however. Various markdown processors support their own way to add classes, or have their own layout engine. As I prefer to keep my markdown as close to the GitHub style as possible, this is not an option for me.

Solution

I have already explored the use of the $= selector for the src attribute in my previous article.

Now let us take this approach a bit further. We declare the CSS like this:

img[src*="+right"] {
  float: right;
  margin-left: 20px;
}
    
img[src*="+third"] {
  width: 30%;
}

This allows us to add classes in markdown inside location hashes.

The following image will be floating on the right.

![illustration]

[illustration]: http://example.com/illustration.png#+right+third

And that is all there is to it.

What happens when you delete ~/.Trash folder on macOS

Tue, 15 May 2018 13:00:00 +0200

I have done some stupid stuff and managed to delete the ~/.Trash folder on my Mac. The result was surprising:

Your browser does not support the video tag.

To fix this you can type this in the shell:

mkdir ~/.Trash

This is clearly bad user experience. Somebody not knowing how to fix this will just assume that the trash stopped working. Even worse, they might miss the message and just click on Delete.

What should macOS do in this case, is to silently restore the trash folder and keep on humming.

Zoom out any page on mobile Safari

Fri, 26 Jan 2018 10:20:00 +0100

Just now I wanted to publish a new version of my app to testers. This is to be done on the iTunes connect website. I only had my phone, but according to Steve “iOS has full web experience” so this should not be a problem.

However, iTunes connect does not work exactly well on mobile. This is because the zoom level of the page is fixed on the “background” while the dialogs are in front. The result is that the button Submit is inaccessible.

After some amount of looking for a solution I have found several bookmarklets that should unlock the zoom. None of them worked. So I made my own solution.

Bookmark this page in Safari and change its URL to this:

javascript:(function(){document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].style.zoom =0.5;})()

Then, on a page which has elements outside of the viewport, launch the bookmark from the bookmark menu. The page will be twice as small, but more of it will fit!

Pure CSS solution to retina images with a single file

Wed, 03 Jan 2018 10:20:50 +0100

Problem: You have an image and want it to display well in browsers on a high DPI display. There are many ways to do this, some of them more complicated than others.

My requirements were pretty simple:

I want to be able to publish “retina” images with default markdown syntax
I prefer images to be blurry on non-high DPI screens, they are blurry anyway so what’s the harm.
I do not care about wasted bandwidth by sending retina assets to clients with standard definition screens. Not having ads or huge javascript on this site makes up for this.
I do not want to use any javascript or server side hacks

So what’s the solution?

Name @2x assets with @2x in their filename, for example image@2x.png
Add this small snippet into my CSS file (thanks, Internet Explorer!)

img[src*='@2x'] {
  zoom:50%;
}

For an example usage look at my article about Qt Creator

Setting File Permissions on Windows With C

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 11:07:22 +0100

Edit 2018-01-19

In my original article I have naively supposed that the group names are not localized. This is false. Always use the Well Known Security IDs when manipulating permissions on Windows.

I’ve spent good part of my morning trying to find a way how to set permissions to a particular group.

Finally while digging though Stack Overflow I have found this question which lead to another because of deprecation errors.

My final version of the code to add file read and write permissions to the group Users is this:

#include <Windows.h>
#include <AccCtrl.h>
#include <Aclapi.h>

const char* fileName = "C:/path/to/your_file.txt";

DWORD result = 0;

PACL pDACL = NULL;
PACL pOldDACL = NULL;
PSECURITY_DESCRIPTOR pSD = NULL;
EXPLICIT_ACCESS ea;
PSID pUsersSID = NULL;

const auto cleanup = [pDACL, pOldDACL, pSD, pUsersSID](){
  if (pOldDACL) LocalFree(pOldDACL);
  if (pDACL) LocalFree(pDACL);
  if (pSD) LocalFree(pSD);
  if (pUsersSID) FreeSid(pUsersSID);
};

result = GetNamedSecurityInfo(static_cast<LPTSTR>(fileName), SE_FILE_OBJECT, DACL_SECURITY_INFORMATION, NULL, NULL, &pOldDACL, NULL, &pSD);
if (result != ERROR_SUCCESS) {
  std::cerr << "Failed to get the security info [" << result << "]" << std::endl;
  cleanup();
  return EReturnCode_Error;
}

ZeroMemory(&ea, sizeof(EXPLICIT_ACCESS));

SID_IDENTIFIER_AUTHORITY SIDAuthNT = {SECURITY_NT_AUTHORITY};
if (!AllocateAndInitializeSid(&SIDAuthNT, 2, SECURITY_BUILTIN_DOMAIN_RID, DOMAIN_ALIAS_RID_USERS, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, &pUsersSID)) {
  std::cerr << "Failed to allocate SID" << std::endl;
  cleanup();
  return EReturnCode_Error;
}

ea.grfAccessPermissions = FILE_GENERIC_WRITE | FILE_GENERIC_READ;
ea.grfAccessMode = SET_ACCESS;
ea.grfInheritance = CONTAINER_INHERIT_ACE | OBJECT_INHERIT_ACE;
ea.Trustee.TrusteeForm = TRUSTEE_IS_SID;
ea.Trustee.TrusteeType = TRUSTEE_IS_WELL_KNOWN_GROUP;
ea.Trustee.ptstrName = reinterpret_cast<LPTSTR>(pUsersSID);

result = SetEntriesInAcl(1, &ea, pOldDACL, &pDACL);
if (result != ERROR_SUCCESS) {
  std::cerr << "Failed to set entries in the access control list [" << result << "]" << std::endl;
  cleanup();
  return EReturnCode_Error;
}

result = SetNamedSecurityInfo(static_cast<LPTSTR>(fileName), SE_FILE_OBJECT, DACL_SECURITY_INFORMATION, NULL, NULL, pDACL, NULL);
if (result != ERROR_SUCCESS) {
  std::cerr << "Failed to set the security info [" << result << "]" << std::endl;
  cleanup();
  return EReturnCode_Error;
}

cleanup();

Note: You will also need to link your program with Advapi32.lib.

My original code follows, do not use this:

const char* fileName = "C:/path/to/your_file.txt";
PACL pDACL = NULL;    
PACL pOldDACL = NULL;
PSECURITY_DESCRIPTOR pSD = NULL;
EXPLICIT_ACCESS ea;

GetNamedSecurityInfo(static_cast<LPTSTR>(fileName), SE_FILE_OBJECT, 
                     DACL_SECURITY_INFORMATION, NULL, NULL, 
                     &pOldDACL, NULL, &pSD);

ZeroMemory(&ea, sizeof(EXPLICIT_ACCESS));

char groupUsersName[6] = {"USERS"};
ea.grfAccessPermissions = FILE_GENERIC_WRITE | FILE_GENERIC_READ;
ea.grfAccessMode = SET_ACCESS;
ea.grfInheritance = CONTAINER_INHERIT_ACE | OBJECT_INHERIT_ACE;
ea.Trustee.TrusteeForm = TRUSTEE_IS_NAME;
ea.Trustee.TrusteeType = TRUSTEE_IS_GROUP;
ea.Trustee.ptstrName = groupUsersName;

SetEntriesInAcl(1, &ea, pOldDACL, &pDACL);

SetNamedSecurityInfo(static_cast<LPTSTR>(fileName), SE_FILE_OBJECT, 
                     DACL_SECURITY_INFORMATION, NULL, NULL, pDACL, NULL);

Centre a one line text in a UITextView

Fri, 25 Dec 2015 07:59:02 +0000

I had a problem. First I have set up an UITextView with these parameters:

view.backgroundColor = UIColor.blueColor()
view.text = "An example text"
view.textColor = UIColor.whiteColor()
view.textContainerInset.top = 0
view.textContainerInset.bottom = 0

I wanted to be able to centre the text in the view vertically. This should be easy, one just needs to position the top of the text according to the formula: top = (container.height - content.height) / 2. However, when you look at the actual look of the UITextView you will see this:

view.font = UIFont.boldSystemFontOfSize(100.0)

view.font = UIFont(name: "DINCondensed-Bold", size: 100.0)

Ouch, there is a semi-randomly placed offset at the top of the text. Turns out the point size of a font is not always the one you have demanded. However it is possible to get the actual height. An UIFont class provides a bunch of useful metrics:

view.font = UIFont.boldSystemFontOfSize(100.0)
view.font.capHeight // 70.5
view.font.pointSize // 100.0
view.font.ascender // 95.2
view.font.lineHeight // 119.3

view.font = UIFont(name: "DINCondensed-Bold", size: 100.0)
view.font.capHeight // 71.2
view.font.pointSize // 100.0
view.font.ascender // 71.2
view.font.lineHeight // 100.0

On a graph this would look like this:

Finally, the method you can now use is:

extension UITextView {
  func centerTextVertically() {
    guard let ascender = view.font?.ascender else {
      return
    }
    guard let capHeight = view.font?.capHeight else {
      return
    }
    view.textContainerInset.top = (view.bounds.height - ascender - (ascender - capHeight)) / CGFloat(2.0)
  }
}

Note that this will only for one liners and only if you know the height of the UITextView (i.e.: the height was given to it on creation)

Make Notes.app more beautiful

Mon, 11 Nov 2013 15:59:51 +0000

A bit of googling shows that the old version of the Notes.app will not work in Mavericks. But luckily one quickly finds out that the Resources folder is quite resourceful.

Namely there are two files that are interesting:

In /Applications/Notes.app/Contents/Resources there is a file named paper.tiff which looks like this:

Yup, this is the ugly texture under the text. Small change to it and we have something looking like a post-it already. Now, this method is not new and plenty has been written about it.

The other change is to change the default fonts, once again in /Applications/Notes.app/Contents/Resources/en.lproj there is a file called DefaultFonts.plist and it is quite straightforward. I am a huge fan of TektonPro for notes so I put in

<dict>
<key>FontName</key>
<string>TektonPro-Bold</string>
<key>Size</key>
<integer>14</integer>
</dict>

And ’lo my new Notes.app look:

I’ve made a quick mod to patch the files. You can grab it here:

Mod for Notes.app v1

iPhone : Connect to iTunes to Use Push Notifications

Wed, 23 Oct 2013 10:02:35 +0000

It seems that this message is randomly appearing for quite some people. It did for me when I updated to the iOS 7.0.3.

There are several solutions available on the internet including:

Backup to iTunes Do factory reset Restore from Backup Re-install applications from appstore

Although this will probably work for everybody it is not the best of the solutions.

For me disabling iCloud Keychain was sufficient, hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Gtk, Glade and signal handlers in C++

Thu, 05 May 2011 08:00:49 +0000

Much was written about connecting signal handlers to interfaces made with Glade and imported with GtkBuilder. The problem is that everybody uses a different system and/or language. So here is a guide which explains all the magic:

Glade Interface

First of all create your widget in Glade and assign it a signal handler. We are going to create a very simple application which has a single button which exits it. The Glade interface should look something like this. It is basically a Main Window (main_window) widget with a Button (exit_button) inside. We define a handler for the signal “clicked” for the button and call it exit_button_handler.

C++ code

Now let’s create the source file, it looks like this. As you can see our signal handler is just a basic void returning function.

#include <gtk/gtk.h>

extern "C" G_MODULE_EXPORT void exit_button_handler(GtkObject* caller, gpointer data)
{
    gtk_main_quit();
}

int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
    gtk_init(&amp;argc, &amp;argv);
    GtkBuilder* l_BuilderInterface = gtk_builder_new();
    gtk_builder_add_from_file(l_BuilderInterface, "ui.glade", NULL);
    gtk_builder_connect_signals(l_BuilderInterface, NULL);
    gtk_widget_show(GTK_WIDGET(gtk_builder_get_object(l_BuilderInterface, "main_window")));
    gtk_main();
    return 0;
}

The important thing to notice is that the declaration of the callback function is preceded by extern "C" G_MODULE_EXPORT. These two bits of code ensure that the produced object will have a C-compatible table-entry for this function even though we are using a C++ compiler and that it will be accessible under Windows as well. Indeed, the G_MODULE_EXPORT macro expands to nothing under Linux.

Compilation

Now, we need to compile the whole thing. Let’s say we have called the file above main.cpp. The line to call on Linux would be :

g++ `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0 gmodule-2.0` main.cpp -o test

Let’s look at the output of the pkg-config file for a while :

-pthread -I/usr/include/atk-1.0 -I/usr/include/pango-1.0 -I/usr/include/gio-unix-2.0/ -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/glib-2.0/include -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include/libpng12 -I/usr/include/gtk-2.0 -I/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/include -I/usr/include/cairo -I/usr/include/gdk-pixbuf-2.0 -I/usr/include/pixman-1  -pthread -Wl,--export-dynamic -L/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu -lgtk-x11-2.0 -lgdk-x11-2.0 -latk-1.0 -lgio-2.0 -lpangoft2-1.0 -lpangocairo-1.0 -lgdk_pixbuf-2.0 -lm -lcairo -lpango-1.0 -lfreetype -lfontconfig -lgobject-2.0 -lgthread-2.0 -lgmodule-2.0 -lrt -lglib-2.0

That’s a lot of stuff! Depending on the system your mileage can vary, but the important bit is : -Wl,--export-dynamic. This piece of code ensures that you will be actually able to find the symbol once it is needed. On Windows, there is no need for the –export-dynamic flag, just be sure to load the gtk library as well as the gmodule. And that’s it, done and done!