A quiet week with only a small amount of computing, as it was mostly occupied by having the house repainted and moving furniture around and around.

Bending computers to my will

As I mentioned last week, I started using battleschool to set up my computer. But I quickly became frustrated with the idea of having one setup control only one computer for one user. I have multiple computers, and I do want them set up in different ways with different software. So I wrote a wrapper around battleschool, called bend.

Instead of creating the config.yml file and running battle, you would create files for things that apply to every computer/user, and more specific files for hosts and users. Then running bend creates the merged configuration and runs battle for you. It is also opinionated in the same way I am that config files live in ~/etc/thing not ~/.thing (at least by default). You can see [my setup on GitHub] for an example of how to use bend.

Why bend? Well, because it bends my computers to my will, but also partly because I name my computers after nicknames for being lefthanded (southpaw, etc), so it amuses me to setup my laptop by typing the command bend sinister.