tooling

The Sony DPT-RP1 is a large-screen E Ink reader built for A4 PDFs. Sony ships the same firmware image in China, Japan, and the United States. A region identifier stored outside the firmware selects the UI language, the input methods, and the default font families, so flashing firmware cannot change the region.

The Japanese build has Japanese and English fonts. The American build has English only, while the Chinese build has Chinese and English. My Japanese unit rendered Chinese characters in a book's table of contents with Japanese glyph variants, or did not render them at all. The Chinese and American builds did not have that problem. Their default font families differ.

Making a macOS USB installer becomes awkward when the host and target use different architectures or macOS generations. I ran into it while reinstalling macOS 10.7 Lion on a 2012 Mac Pro from an M1 MacBook Air. The M1 cannot run Lion's installer, and Apple's direct Lion download is packaged in a form that modern macOS refuses to open.

ACME is the protocol for automated certificate management. Let's Encrypt speaks ACME. Certbot is the official ACME client from EFF. This guide covers Certbot with Cloudflare DNS validation.

Jekyll is a static site generator written in Ruby. It renders Markdown through Liquid templates into static HTML. The published site is a directory of files with no database and no server-side runtime at request time.

On Apple Silicon, the Ruby toolchain needs a little setup first: Homebrew, a Ruby version manager, and the gem path.