Moving a Git Submodule

A coworker asked me a question this evening about how to move a Git submodule to a sub-directory, and as it’s something I’ve had to look up multiple times in the past, I decided it would be good to post it here for easy lookup in the future.

How to move a Git submodule to a sub-directory

1. Delete the submodule reference from .gitmodules (normally 3 lines)
2. Check .git/config for references to the submodule and remove them, if they exist
3. Run git rm --cached <submodule name> to remove the submodule reference from the repository
4. Remove the old submodule folder
5. Recreate your submodule reference with git submodule add <git repo url> <local path>

I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload (Day 20/100). You can join in yourself by visiting https://100DaysToOffload.com.

Initial Thoughts on a Personal Wiki

Approximately two weeks ago, I wrote a blog post where I mentioned that I was interested in setting up a personal wiki, or something similar, as a way to keep an online commonplace book. I’ve been taking notes on the idea ever since, and today, I finally decided to give it a try.

Requirements

I had a few different requirements.

1. Easy to maintain & use
2. Markdown support
3. Accessible and editable on all devices
4. Web-based, so that I’m not handling syncing between devices
5. FOSS

Enter Wiki.js

After a decent amount of research, where I looked at pretty much every FOSS solution for a personal wiki, I settled on Wiki.js. There were a couple of features that lured me in.

Micro-Update: KDE Konsole and tmux

I ran into an interesting issue this morning after running system updates on my main desktop computer (running Arch Linux with the KDE Plasma desktop). For some reason, although I don’t think any behavior was intentionally changed by the developers (and I’m not blaming anyone), Konsole (a KDE terminal app) started intercepting the CTRL+B key combo that is used by tmux. It turns out that this is a standard “Add Bookmark” shortcut in the Plasma desktop environment.

Micro-Update: Recommended Firefox Extensions

I realized this morning that I frequently give recommendations to friends and family on apps and tools to use, books and blogs to read, podcasts to listen to, etc. And so, instead of constantly pulling up my notes and then sending a list individually to each person, I decided to begin creating pages here on my website briefly listing my recommendations, and why I recommend them.

The first (and only) page so far is my recommendations for Firefox Extensions. However, I expect to add more in short order, at which time I’ll add a blog post announcing them as well. My goal is to keep these pages updated and current, as I personally hate it when I come across recommendations that I think sound useful, and then find out that they are years out of date.

Asocial? A Life Without Social Media

In November of 2018, I logged out of Facebook and Instagram for the last time, deleted my Snapchat account, and removed the Twitter app from my phone. A few months later, I also shuttered my Twitter account. After debating it for many years, and attempting (and failing) multiple times, I was finally done with social media.

It’s been almost a year since that time, and so I decided to do a quick retrospective to answer the following question, something I wish I would have had to read before making my choice: what’s it like to be 30, in the tech sector, and not on any traditional social media platforms? In short, it’s both amazing, and also sometimes slightly annoying.

Leaving Android Behind

If someone were to have told me that I’d be leaving Android at the start of 2019, I’d have told them they were crazy. After all, when I switched to Android from iOS in 2015, I decided that I would be staying with the platform for the foreseeable future. And the further I got into that future, the more entrenched I became in the Android ecosystem, to the point that switching would be painful on both my pocketbook, and on my daily life. But here we are: it’s September, and I’m officially leaving Android behind, and switching to an iPhone. So… why an iPhone? After all, I’m a Linux user, right? Wouldn’t it make more sense to move to another Android-based system, or a Linux phone?

Abandoning Audible

Every year, when it comes time to renew memberships and subscriptions to various online services, I sit down and re-evaluate if they are still worth the amount of money that I am spending. It is relatively rare that something gets added to the yearly subscription list, and even rarer when a service gets removed. I’ve also found that, year after year, there have been a collection of services that I haven’t even considered removing. And up until this year, Audible was one of those services…