Lewis Walsh

A photo posted by Lewis Walsh (@lewiswalsh79) on Jul 9, 2015 at 12:32am PDT

I first encountered the SSH config when I had to set up SSH for two BitBucket accounts. One work, and one personal. Requiring separate login credentials, setting the remote on Git repositories to ssh://git@bitbucket.org/... wasn't going to work.

Each BitBucket account requires a different public SSH key so for two accounts I needed to generate two sets of keys. You'll likely already have a keyset called id_rsa so call the new one something else:

$ ssh-keygen 
Generating public/private rsa key pair.  
Enter file in which to save the key (/Users/you/.ssh/id_rsa): bb-personal  

Now in your ~/.ssh/ directory create a new file simply called config, for my example it looks like this:

Host bitbucket-work  
  User git
  Hostname bitbucket.org
  PreferredAuthentications publickey
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/bb_work

Host bitbucket-personal  
  User git
  Hostname bitbucket.org
  PreferredAuthentications publickey
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/bb_personal

Now instead of bitbucket.org in my git remote URIs I substitute the relevant Host from my config:

ssh://git@bitbucket-personal/...  

Of course, you need to ensure the public key is configured over on BitBucket, GitHub etc.

To use config with your own remote machines is just as easy. You can use any of the keys you already have on your system, or create a new one as shown above.

If it doesn't exist, create a file in the ~/.ssh/ directory on your remote machine called authorized_keys and copy the public key in to it, each one on a new line. Never the private key!

Now in your config file on your local machine create a new host for your remote machine:

Host me-production  
  User lewis
  Hostname <your host or ip>
  PreferredAuthentications publickey
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Strictly speaking, I don't think the User line is necessary.

Now all I need to type in the terminal to ssh in to my production box is:

$ ssh me-production

Derek Sivers, the former big cheese at CD Baby and a very interesting guy, has a /now page. Yesterday a slow movement started that has snowballed since. He's written a post about it.

The idea is a simple page on a personal website that shows what we're all up to at the moment. The page should really be written in the present tense. And by standardising the /now URI it makes it easy to find.

A lot of people seem to be using it as another about me page, or as another way to advertise their product or service. That's ok I suppose, but I don't think that's really in the spirit of it.

I love this idea. But I want to see what people are doing with all their time. I want to get a sense of the person's whole life right now.

Here's mine.

Update 30-10-2015 Derek has launched a site listing people with a /now page.

Until it has support for plugins (namely μBlock Origin and LastPass), Microsoft Edge browser will not become my primary browser. However I find myself using it a lot.

Firstly, it starts quickly and is a great way to use the web without being signed in to Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. Things I used to fire up a Chrome Incognito window for I now use Edge for. It's also a pleasure to use, sites render properly and it feels fast and light. On my Dell XPS 13 2015 the two-finger scroll is smooth and responsive, something I can't say about Chrome.

Secondly, in the excellent developer tools there is one button in the debugger that has made debugging a lot easier:

That little button above is called 'Debug just my code' and intelligently figures out what JavaScript is a library and what is site code. This stops the debugger going too deep when tracing issues.