Bennett Notes

When I start working on a side project, I fall into a really bad habit of getting too absorbed in it. The second I get home from work, I will start coding and testing for hours until I have to force myself to go to bed with only six hours of sleep at best. All the while, my laundry starts to pile up, my kitchen doesn’t get cleaned, and my social contacts get neglected from any meaningful conversation. [Read More]

WordPress isn’t awful. In fact, I recommend WordPress to everyone who wants to start a blog. Despite this, I switched from WordPress to Hugo a couple of weeks ago. The real reason came down to cost and simplicity. Cost Running a WordPress blog meant that I needed a good shared hosting environment with a MySQL server and PHP execution. I first tried Hostgator, and it was sufficient enough while my blog had less than a hundred of visitors per month. [Read More]

I am beginning to see the relationship between happiness, anticipation and dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is responsible for reward-driven behavior and pleasure seeking. (Psychology Today). When we get a hit of dopamine, we feel good! Anticipation is the simple act of looking forward; usually to a pleasurable experience but it could also be negative. In my previous post about Proven Ways to be Happy Again, I mentioned this thing called hedonic adaptation. [Read More]

During the winter holidays (peek depression season), I took a free online course called The Science of Well-Being offered by Yale University. It was actually recommended in a HackerNews comment that I came across in a thread about different MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses) to take. Other than my obsession with self help porn, I took this course because I wanted to learn on how to be happy again with life. [Read More]

A few weeks back I was working on a project where I needed to read system environment in Angular 7 from a Docker container before it builds. After days of searching, I came across a solution from multiple sources on the internet. Keep one thing in mind, you will only be able to inject environment variables before your Angular app builds. Unlike Nodejs, you will not get real time access because you are running in an browser environment. [Read More]

Setting up search your static site built using Hugo or Jekyll is not as difficult as it sounds. If your static site is hosted on GitHub pages (which mine currently is), then you will not be able to use php or any server side scripting. Therefore, we must rely on a pure javascript solution. Using Lunr.js Lunr is a popular library used to parse through data and return the most accurate match based on a search query. [Read More]

If you are trying to be more social, consider investing in traditional books over EBooks. I know this sounds crazy, and no, Amazon did not pay me to say this. Ebooks are missing an important aspect that we have always took for granted in traditional book. There is no easily visible cover! This means people have no idea on what you’re reading. With traditional books, its out in the open for everyone to see. [Read More]

You have probably discovered that downloading videos from certain websites is hard. If you try to download a video from youtube, you have to use one of the ad-infested free YouTube video downloaders. Other sites like Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr are even harder to find downloaders for. Luckily, there is a free and open-source program that will end your struggles and help you download and video from any site for free. [Read More]

Believe it or not, Windows 10 comes with a lot of bloatware pre-installed on it. Things like Candy crash, Bing Weather, Bing Sports, etc. If you really wanted to, you could go through the programs and features tool and remove each app individually. However, that would take a lot of unnecessary time and some apps wouldn’t show up in that menu. To overcome this challenge, a user on GitHub created a Windows 10 bloatware removal script that uses PowerShell to remove the unnecessary apps. [Read More]

Let’s not romanticize imperfection. The Pixel 3 is not _The Little Engine That Could, _or some gifted boy who was born without legs. There are people out there who treat Google like the underdog; despite the fact that they have full control over the future of Android. And while there’s nothing wrong with having favorites in a race, it can be dangerous to idolize a runner just based off his shoes. [Read More]