Software Tools

Every project in this collection is written on the same machine, in the same terminal, against the same set of tools. This site documents that layer. Not what to build, but what you build it with.

Pages are written the way you would actually want to read them at the moment something breaks: the mental model first, then the commands, then the gotcha that cost an evening. Several are explicitly comparisons, because the useful question is usually which of two tools rather than how one works.

For the physical machines see Hardware Tools, and for containers and services see IaaS.

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Linux

Page	Covers
Shell Commands	The broad tour: what a shell is, file and text manipulation, redirection and pipes, permissions, process and system management, networking, packages, environment variables, and archiving
Users, Groups and Permissions	The longest page here. User types and management, the files behind them, UIDs and GIDs, groups, the permission bits, switching users, and session management
Bash Scripts	Variables, conditionals, loops, functions, arguments, and error handling, with worked examples
systemd Services	Unit files, creating and enabling a service, resource management through cgroups, and the practices that keep units maintainable
journalctl	Reading the logs that systemd produces
Display Systems	X11 against Wayland, then the desktop environments on top: GNOME, KDE Plasma, XFCE
New Linux Computer	The setup checklist for a fresh Ubuntu box: git, VS Code, stow, tmux, SSH keys, curl, and battery charge limits
WSL	Running Linux under Windows: enabling the feature, the config files, and port forwarding back to Windows

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Terminal and Editors

Page	Covers
Tmux	Sessions, windows, and panes, which is the whole model
Vim	Modes, the basic commands, the advanced features, and customisation
Neovim	What it adds over Vim, and its plugin ecosystem

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Build and Task Runners

Two pages that answer one question between them.

Page	Covers
Make	GNU make properly: the core mental model, special variables, phony targets as the number one gotcha, the fact that each recipe line runs in a new shell, the four assignment operators, includes, pattern rules, and the functions you reach for constantly
Just	A command runner that looks like make but is not a build system, because it does not do timestamp-based rebuilds. Recipes, dependencies, arguments, dotenv behaviour, portability, and a direct comparison against make

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Virtualization

Page	Covers
Proxmox	The platform end to end: what it is, requirements, getting started, storage and partitioning, users, GPU passthrough, cloud-init, device discovery, and maintenance
Proxmox Storage	All ten backends compared, directory through LVM, LVM-thin, ZFS, Ceph, NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, and GlusterFS, with what each is actually for. Worth reading before creating a guest, because the choice is hard to undo

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Development Environment

Page	Covers
JupyterLab	Server configuration: logging, security, SSL, performance, working directory, terminals, extensions, and kernel management
VS Code Debugging	debugpy and the launch.json that drives it
Quarto	Installing the renderer behind every site in this collection
LaTeX	Installation
PlatformIO	The embedded toolchain: project anatomy, the platformio.ini recipe, everyday CLI, library resolution gotchas, build flags, multi-board environments, debugging, Unity testing, and selective builds

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Programming Concepts

Page	Covers
Design Patterns	The three families: creational, structural, and behavioural
Algorithms	The algorithms worth knowing, ordered by learning priority
C++	Syntax through to modern C++: types, control flow, functions, OOP, memory management, templates, the STL, and the C++11 to C++23 additions
Abstract Syntax Trees	What an AST is and why “abstract”, how one is produced, traversal patterns, where they show up in real tooling, and how they differ from related representations
Regex	Syntax, groups and alternation, lookarounds, Python’s re, practical cases, and performance

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Diagrams

A six-part folder on drawing software, organised by what the diagram is for rather than by notation. Most pages carry copy-paste Mermaid.

Page	Covers
Overview	The map of diagram types
Structural	Class, ER, component, deployment, and package diagrams, and what each is actually good for
Behavioural	Sequence, state machine, and activity diagrams, plus why to skip the communication diagram
Requirements and Scope	Use cases, user flows, journey maps, and requirement traceability: what the system is for and where it stops
Architectural	The non-UML notations that most architecture questions actually want: the four C4 levels, data flow diagrams with a threat model on top, and network topology
Process and Ops	Gantt and dependency charts, swimlanes, and timing diagrams

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Security, Capture, and Agents

Page	Covers
MFA	Multi-factor authentication end to end: the three factors, methods ranked by security, the attacks against each, how MFA differs from 2FA and passwordless, cloud platform support, and compliance
Sound Testing	Recording from a microphone inside a notebook, visualising the waveform, playing it back, and basic quality metrics
Sound Testing 2	A second pass over the same ground with additional quality checks
Camera Testing	Capturing from a camera
Browser Use	The library that gives an LLM control of Chromium by serialising the page into indexed interactive elements and looping. Architecture, API surface, model choice, the commercial layer, where it earns its keep, and the gotchas

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Not Covered Yet

• Git has no page, despite being the tool used most. Version control is covered from the GitHub side in Web Development.
• No editor configuration page. Vim and Neovim are covered as tools, but the actual dotfiles and plugin setup are not written down anywhere.
• Nothing on ssh and remote work as a subject, only the key setup buried in the new-computer checklist.
• Graphify is a stub, three cells with no content.
• The two sound testing pages duplicate each other and should be merged.
• Linux/04_Bash_Scritps.ipynb is misspelled in the filename, which is why the URL looks wrong.

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