I originally coded the categories listing as part of the overall Counter addin to Ode early last year, and Ode project leader Rob Reed lent his expertise to the addin, optimizing the code and squashing a few bugs in the process.

I had the categories listing in my right-hand column for a while, but since this Ode site has a LOT of directories/folders in it, that display made the right side of the page super long.

So I wanted the ability for readers to show/hide that listing. I didn't want to use jQuery, but I was very open to using vanilla JavaScript to make it happen.

And so I did. I looked at a lot of tutorials on how to hide the content of HTML divs (i.e. the stuff between a <div> and a </div>), and this one struck me as both simple and effective (meaning it's short and it works).

So now you can click Show / hide categories on the right to see the entire structure of the documents directory and drill down into topics that may be of interest.

Rob did a lot of work on my code, and I looked back at our e-mail thread from March 2016 and realized that I'm not even running the most recent version of the Counter addin on this site. Once I get that up and running, I will work on expanding the documentation on how to use the addin and then make it available to all.

Thanks go to Will Master for the JavaScript and Rob Reed for the Perl.

Once I figured out the concept of an addin (or, at any rate, my addin), I was off to the races. It was basically, "figure out what you want to display, figure out how to pull the information using Perl and the Ode addin structure, then drop tags into my Ode template to display the information."

Of course you can also say, "Here are things I can do in Perl, maybe it will be cool to put that on the web site." I guess I did a little of that, too.

However you slice it up, writing code and seeing results on a live web site is fun. In the Ode world, you can do that with HTML and CSS just like with any web site, and you can also write Perl addins. With this most recent hack (the show/hide), it was a matter of "appropriating" some vanilla JavaScript to add a feature I've been wanting for some time.

Even though preloaded Linux laptops like Dell's new Precision 3520 are a great thing -- and can save you $100 in this case, I'd probably have to reinstall because a factory image of the operating system most likely doesn't take into account one thing I want in any desktop Linux system: full disk encryption.

From the days when I ran Debian, through today's Fedora 24, I opt for full disk encryption in the installer. It's the right thing to do. If your laptop falls into the "wrong" hands, your data is encrypted and away from the prying eyes of whoever gets your gear.

Windows users can take advantage of disk encryption ... in some cases. While the Home edition of Windows 10 doesn't offer it, the Pro/Enterprise edition does have an option to encrypt your data.

It's nice that the installers of many major Linux distributions, including Debian, Fedora, CentOS/RHEL and Ubuntu (and its many flavors) offer full disk encryption (not just user files, though Ubuntu does offer a user-files encryption option) -- and any user can take advantage of that protection for the low price of $0.