Posts on rameezkhan.me

Using Claude Cowork to Process Scanned PDF Receipts for Expense Claims

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I recently returned from a business trip with a folder full of scanned receipts. The task ahead was familiar and tedious: match each receipt to my bank statement and fill out the company expense form. It’s the kind of work that demands attention but not creativity - perfect for automation.

That’s when I thought: what if I tried Claude’s new cowork feature for this?

What is Cowork?

Cowork is Claude’s autonomous work mode. Rather than a back-and-forth conversation, you give Claude a task with clear instructions and let it work through the steps - reading files, creating folders, writing documents, and reasoning through problems.

Extracting, Transcribing, and Summarising Audio from Vimeo

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous Nix post I mentioned how you can run once-off commands with Nix without polluting your system environment.

First, the why. My community group hosts regular townhall meetings that I often can’t attend in person. Fortunately, recordings get posted to Vimeo afterwards. Rather than watching hour-long videos, I wanted a faster way to stay informed - hence this workflow.

In this post, I want to demonstrate how you can extract audio from a Vimeo video, transcribe it to text, and generate a summary - all using nix run.

Slow Fingers: Week 2 of Colemak on the Moonlander

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the last post I mentioned my journey of attempting to learn the Colemak DH keyboard layout on the Moonlander keyboard.

I am now about one week into this journey.

Here is a little snapshot of my progress and overall thoughts.

Slow but consistent progress

I’ve committed to doing 30 minute sessions daily (not super strict on the weekends) on Keybr. You can configure the settings to prefer home row keys first. This is super useful for getting comfortable with which finger should rest on which key.

Moonlander: Split Keyboard and Split Brain

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you were to ask a programmer what their number one productivity tool in their arsenal is, I’d bet very few would say “a keyboard”.

This is the very perception I’m hoping to challenge with my purchase of the Moonlander keyboard.

Current typing setup

I’m currently typing this using a QWERTY layout on a Keychron K2, a 75% keyboard running Cherry MX Browns.

I’ve never fully learned to touch type and as a result I type at an average of 80 to 90 wpm. With an accuracy of around 90 to 95%.

Self-Contained and Reproducible Scripts Using the Nix Shebang

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous Nix post I mentioned how you can run once-off commands with Nix without polluting your system environment.

In this post, I want to demonstrate how you can create self-contained and reproducible scripts using the Nix shebang.

Simple cowsay script

Using the interactive `nix-shell`

To start, imagine a scenario where you want a cow to “moo” using cowsay.

The bash script moo.sh would contain.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

cowsay "moo"

To obtain the cowsay binary without polluting your system environment you would first generate a temporary environment.

Changelog #2: Grinders and Babies

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hey Friends, welcome to the 2nd edition of the Changelog series.

This edition describes some of the happenings roughly between 2022-09 and 2022-10.

A self-declared coffee fanatic

I would call myself a coffee fanatic (snob?).

The range of snobbishness is variable I guess. You only have to visit r/coffee to see what I mean.

Around 2016, we bought our first Nespresso pod machine. It was the Nespresso Inissia. At the time both the Wife and I were having our coffees with two sugars and milk.

Giscus for Comments

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Giscus is a solid option if you’re looking for a low-impedance alternative to Disqus.

Remember when Disqus was a thing?

On my old blog I used an off-the-shelf Gatsby template which came bundled with Disqus support.

I didn’t know better at the time so I just went with it.

So I know I’m probably late to the lets-move-away-from-disqus-party, but now, re-writing this blog and re-thinking the tech stack behind it, it was time to give some more thought to this.

Colima as a Docker Desktop Replacement?

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

An attempt at finding a drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop on macOS.

Why a replacement?

Docker Desktop has been the gold standard for building and running containers on macOS.

But what is it? Is it just a fancy container GUI?

Well, no.

The single, downloadable package comes built-in with everything you need to build and run Docker images on your machine. Besides running a VM in the background as a daemon, Docker Desktop provides seamless plumbing into the host machine with sane and secure defaults ¹.

Changelog #1: Quarter of the man I used to be

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hey Friends, welcome to the 1st edition of what I’m calling the Changelog series. A series where I hope to get all my thoughts and musings down on to paper (so to say).

Since this the first in the series, this post is a high level summary of some the highlights roughly between 2021-08 and 2022-09.

Shedding a quarter

Around August last year (2021), while playing in the garden with the first born, I found myself completely out of breath just two minutes in.

Once-off Commands with Nix

Mon, 10 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

No need to pollute your system environment

In the last post we discussed why it might not be wise to pollute your system (or global) environment by installing programs you’ll only run once.

Often, these programs are installed and then forgotten about causing unnecessary bloat.

A pristine system is easily maintained.

When to use `nix-shell` or `nix run`

We also showed in the last post how we could use nix-shell to temporarily bring programs into our path. This is still a viable option for running a once off command.

Per Project Packages using Nix and direnv

Mon, 03 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Why have project specific packages?

There are a few reasons why you would want to have project specific packages.

Different package versions per project e.g. you are maintaining a project that uses an old version of Node.js (like this blog, I’m lazy), but use a newer version globally on your system.
You don’t want to pollute your global environment with packages you’ll only use in an isolated project e.g. nixfmt to format *.nix files in my dotfiles.
Easy on-boarding of a new team member e.g. packages are declared in the same project and it is easy to install and start contributing (more details coming below).

In the Nix ecosystem, this can be achieved using nix-shell.

Emacs Native-Comp on WSL2 with Nix

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Update: As of 2021-04-25 GCC/Native-Comp has been merged into master. I’m sure package managers will be updated soon.

What is Emacs Native-Comp?

Emacs Native-Comp refers a to the feature/native-comp branch of Emacs. It adds support for compiling EmacsLisp to native code using libgccjit. This provides a notable performance improvement right out of the box. See here for more details.

Installing using Nix on WSL2

Note: All instructions below are sourced from this gist. I’m sure the gist will be updated with changes more frequently than this blog post.

Nix as a potential Linuxbrew replacement?

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Linuxbrew

Coming from a MacBook, I became comfortable with Homebrew as a package manager.

Over time, I built up a collection of tools in my dotfiles to maximise my productivity.

When moving over to Ubuntu, I realized a couple of these tools were missing from Apt. Naturally I went with something I was most comfortable with, in this case, Linuxbrew.

Linuxbrew works. It’s just your normal Homebrew on Linux. On the rare occasion, you’ll find an unsupported package. But nothing you can’t manually install.

Goodbye pyenv and nvm. Hello ASDF.

Fri, 09 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

pyenv and nvm

I maintain several side-projects, most of which are either Python or Node.js. For the longest time I used pyenv and nvm to manage different versions of Python and Node.js respectively.

The configuration to manage these would be added to my dotfiles. Over time, my shell (zsh) startup times increased significantly to the point where it took roughly 3 seconds. I spend most of my life at the terminal, so this was insufferable.

Tunneling via Kubernetes

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

For security reasons, you might find your database (or any service for that matter) in an internal subnet, somewhere in the cloud. Accessing this for local debugging/development can be a pain.

Using Kubernetes (assuming you have a cluster already), you can use this to your advantage.

Create the tunnel

What you need:

Kubernetes (with API access via kubectl ofcourse)
An image with netcat installed (Nice opportunity to punt mine 😉)
tcpserver (should come with any Debian based distro)

Next, ensure your pod is running. I have a handy alias for this.

An iPhone only Git workflow for blog posts

Tue, 07 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We are truly living in the future folks!

Or, I may have been living under a rock.

Seriously, I never thought this would be possible on iOS/iPhone. But with some initial setup it is!

So without further ado, this is how I managed to write and deploy this post using only my iPhone.

Apps Used

Working Copy - Git client
Textastic - Text editor with syntax highlighting
Canva - Image editing and templating
GitHub - Official GitHub app for viewing PRs

Workflow

In Working Copy I linked my GitHub account and cloned my blog repo. My blog is written in Gatsby and uses gatsby-remark-transformer to convert Markdown to what you see now. So in Working Copy I navigated to my posts directory and created a new directory. Within that directory I created an empty index.mdfile.

Adding keybindings to Doom Emacs

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Doom Emacs? What happened to Spacemacs?

In my previous post last year … Wow! I’ve really been neglecting this blogging thing, haven’t I?

… I sung the praises for Spacemacs (an Emacs distrubution with pre-configured layers).

I’ve since discovered Doom Emacs and have recently made the switch to it. For two reasons mainly:

Speed. Doom Emacs is fast! Super Fast! (It has some nice lazy loading)

Configuration. Spacemacs did it a lot of magic via its layers configs. I wanted to learn how to configure Emacs myself but didn’t want to start from scratch. Doom Emacs was a nice middle ground.

Search and Replace in Multiple Files with Spacemacs

Wed, 07 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

What is Spacemacs

I’ve been a pure Vim user for many years before I stumbled on Spacemacs.

So what is it?

Spacemacs is a community driven distribution of Emacs. The tagline is The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it's Emacs and Vim!. It’s pretty much Emacs with a well structured configuration system (via something called “Layers”). You can choose to use Vim like keybindings (or what Emacs people call evil).

Debug on Kubernetes with a Swiss-Army Knife of Tools

Thu, 31 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Premise

I often find myself needing to debug some network issue on Kubernetes. This is usually something like doing a traceroute to an external or internal address, checking egress IP addresses, or just needing a shell on the Kubernetes cluster.

The Past

What I used to do is find any running pod on the cluster and shell into it, hoping it’s running some sort of base Alpine/Debian image. Then I’d use whatever the built-in package manager is (apt, yum, etc) to install my the tools (nmap, traceroute, ping, etc).

Proxy SSH traffic via Bastion Hosts with Proxyjump

Fri, 25 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

So what is a bastion host anyways?

It has become the norm these days to have what is called a bastion host (or perhaps more commonly known as a Jumpbox). This machine generally lives in a public subnet and serves as an SSH gateway into the private subnet/network. See below image.

Proxy traffic via the bastion

I’ve always used the ProxyCommand before to achieve this. A quick example would be adding the following to your ~/.ssh/config file.