Hello World

Welcome to heaton.dev!

I work on technology of all kinds and I try to aggregate what I learn here!

► Me, HPC, Linux, tinkerer of things. 🌍🇺🇳🇬🇧🥐☕️ \n

► Cloud HPC Engineer

Opinions are my own, not an endorsement, etc..

WSLg - Graphical Apps on Windows Subsystem for Linux

Windows Subsystem for Linux supports displaying graphical Linux apps, it implements this via transparent RDP which forwards the visuals to Windows. ...

February 21, 2023 · 1 min · Joe Heaton

Git config per directory

I discovered gitconfig’s includeIf feature can change your global Git config depending on which directory you are working in. This is super useful if you have different identities for different project, or you need to specify the SSH key to use, etc.. in my case I want to use my personal email address for personal projects and work email for work projects. So let’s assume a directory layout like this:...

February 9, 2023 · 1 min · Joe Heaton

Split Audio for Streaming via OBS

Streaming from your PC can be tricky, your computer makes a lot of sounds that you don’t want to be broadcast; Whether that be a video tutorial playing in the background, chat notification sounds, or even your voice calls. This setup uses VB-Audio’s VB-CABLE Virtual Audio Device, you can download it for free at vb-audio.com/Cable . For more complex setups you can incorporate multiple virtual audio adapters, up to four extra are available on the same website as donationware....

February 5, 2023 · 2 min · Joe Heaton

Git Commands

Some of my most visited Stack Overflow answers are on how to use Git! We all remember how to add, commit, push, but how often to do you rebase, resolve merge conflicts, modify old commits? Here I’m going to list out all the Git commands I usually look-up! Including any relevant updates, since Git and the way we use Git is always evolving! Commands Git config for a directory full of repositories When you have sets of git repositories with different credentials it can be useful to manage shared git configuration across them....

February 2, 2023 · 5 min · Joe Heaton

Ansible via Google Cloud IAP Tunnel

Ansible is a great tool for managing configuration across a fleet of compute resources, but it struggles with dynamic sets of compute that are constantly being destroyed and spawned since it the user has to maintain a static list of hostnames. ...

September 23, 2022 · 2 min · Joe Heaton

Terraform init-validate-plan-apply Bash function

Tired of typing Terraform init, validate, apply? I’ve written this bash function to speed this up and implement some good practices. ...

July 14, 2022 · 3 min · Joe Heaton

Google Cloud CLI 'gcloud' Variables

I find it useful to frontload my terminals with context about my environment; You wouldn’t want to deploy to the wrong environment now would you? Here I extract information from Google Cloud CLI and print it at the start of every new terminal tab in order to understand exactly where my Google Cloud API requests will go by default. GCP $GCP_APP_CRED_PROJECT=my-project GCP $GCP_CONFIGURATION=my-project GCP $GCP_PROJECT=my-project ...

June 21, 2022 · 2 min · Joe Heaton

Export a Vroid Avatar to VRChat

Vroid Studio is a quick & easy 3D character editor which can export to the Unity game engine and from there, integrate into metaverse platforms; in this tutorial we will take our Vroid model and import it into VRChat , a platform for socialising in virtual reality with user-generated worlds. ...

June 1, 2022 · 4 min · Joe Heaton

Understand MermaidJS; Concepts & Syntax

MermaidJS is great because it brings graphs-as-code to the web! No longer do we need to run graphviz from the commandline to generate static image files each time we make a change; Now we see changes instantly, embed graphs with ease in source repositories and track their changes, etc.. The trouble I’ve had with Mermaid is figuring out the syntax, there are quite a few gotchas which don’t advertise themselves very clearly, such as it not tolerating blank lines, or spaces are comma-deliminated lists.. I’ll list these here so you can get graphing quicker than I did! ...

May 17, 2022 · 2 min · Joe Heaton

Styling MermaidJS

What’s better than a graph? A graph with style! Using Mermaid’s class definitions we can style blocks and subgraphs to reflect the ecosystem they belong to; In this case I want to style my infrastructure diagrams to Google’s branding. ...

May 13, 2022 · 2 min · Joe Heaton