paste.winny.tech (Sillypaste) is dead

Saturday, May 4, 2024

What’s worse than a fire on a boat? A fire aboard an air balloon. Rip my fly.io app. Affected Apps: sillypaste-db A server hosting some of your apps has suffered irreparable hardware damage. Please migrate your Fly Machines to other hosts and restore volumes from any backups. All good things come to an end, including this pastebin project. If I find myself using it again, I may spin up a fresh database if that opportunity presents itself.

Test your backups

Saturday, Jan 27, 2024

Figure 1: John from USA - CC-BY-2.0 Watch out, things break, stuff catches fire. Let’s talk about backups. Last post, I stated that I’m going to switch focus away from NixOS commentary. This is still the plan. Today, I am still committed to NixOS thanks to technical debt created - migrations aren’t for free. Until then, enjoy my NixOS posting :). Last fall, I wanted to reformat my laptop’s NixOS deployment from BTRFS (encased within LVM2 itself encased in LUKS) to a ZFS partition plus another swap partition.

Another NixOS 23.11 upgrade gotcha

Monday, Jan 15, 2024

Figure 1: The laptop that was having a bad day with NixOS 23.11 More upgrade gotchas. Shucks. If everything goes well, this will be my last NixOS post. Read on to understand my frustration just a little bit more. My main laptop is a Lenovo Ideapad Flex 5 — simple and cheap device. The keyboard stopped working in the early boot after upgrading to 23.11. The impact: I need to a USB keyboard around to unlock the device from a cold boot.

Multiple arguments in shebang

Wednesday, Jan 10, 2024

Figure 1: Jamian · CC BY 3.0 Deed (link) A frequent quip of the unix-beard is shebangs cannot contain multiple command-line arguments. Let’s break it down and see where this assumption no longer holds true. What is a Shebang? The shebang is the line at the beginning scripts such as Python and Shell scripts that instructs the OS how to execute the script. Looks something like #!/bin/sh or #!/usr/bin/env python.

Upgrading my Workstation to NixOS 23.11

Wednesday, Jan 3, 2024

Figure 1: Official image for 23.11 Upgrading my workstation to 23.11 wasn’t as simple as I was hoping. Ran into a few issues. Performing the upgrade I’m using a flake, so all I should have to run is: # First edit flake.nix so it points to release-23.11. nix flake update nixos-rebuild boot --flake .# (Then systemctl reboot into the new generation that includes a new kernel.) Issue #1: pinentry package changes I can’t unlock any keys using gpg-agent (hence cannot use GPG keys for accessing my password database and send signed documents).

My 2023 in review

Thursday, Dec 21, 2023

Figure 1: Dietmar Rabich CC BY-SA 4.0 (link) Things that I achieved this year. Exercise. I was going 3 times a week to the gym. Now I’m working out at home about once a week. A no-processed-foods diet. Occasional respite from some health issues. I’m not dieing so that’s pretty cool. Remained self-employed. Even after many project transitions including firing a toxic client. Worked with some new technologies including Love2d, Fennel, Angular 3, Next.

Sway review

Thursday, Oct 26, 2023

Hello, my name is Winny and welcome to my honest review of Sway, a i3wm compatible Wayland compositor. Its primary appeal is a compositor experience that is easy to install, and familiar to i3 users. For my usage, it is one of the few compositors flexible enough to deploy on older hardware. Startup Sway does require a bit of effort and time to get it in a usable state from the stock configuration.