NixOS Migration

Wednesday, Jun 8, 2022

Recently I have begun migrating my workstation and laptop from Gentoo to NixOS. There are a great deal of tradeoffs between the two operating systems. Before going into the details, consider where I’m coming from and why I moved away from Gentoo below. Why was I running Gentoo on workstations?? This is my heuristic for a good operating system: The Distro must provide facility to modify system packages and maintain their modifications in sync with the upstream distro.

Racket on Digital Ocean App Platform

Sunday, May 15, 2022

Digital Ocean’s App Platform works fairly well with Racket. To activate this service, create a git repository with a Dockerfile in it. Your app will be ran as a container built from the Dockerfile and hosted by Digital Ocean. It appears this platform handles load balancing and scaling. These are good value prospects when considering hosting on this platform. If you wish to use a custom domain you can also do so, such as was the case with p.

Auto-rip Music CDs

Monday, Feb 7, 2022

Awhile back I found a stack of audio CDs I wished to digitize. It’s a bit of work to do the following steps quickly and while doing other more cerebral work: Open the disc tray Insert the disc Wait a few seconds for the disc to be detected by the OS Kick off abcde to rip the CD. Repeat ad infinitum. The solution is to streamline the workflow: Open the disc tray (first time only) Insert the disc Wait until abcde is finished and ejects the CD, repeat from step #2.

Set up a Private GitLab Runner on Alpine Linux

Saturday, Jan 29, 2022

GitLab has recently locked down the accessibility to free CI/CD minutes. You now need to provide a Credit Card to prove you’re a human. Apparently cryptofriends were using the CI/CD minutes to mine for cryptocurrencies. Huh… if I had lesser ethics I’d probably do the same thing! Kind of brilliant to be honest. Anyway, the end result is if you want users to contribute to your project they need to either provide a CC or better yet, you can set up private GitLab runners.

Migrating from Emacs 26 to Emacs 27 on Gentoo

Sunday, Nov 28, 2021

Figure 1: Behold! Emacs 27! When upgrading to Emacs 27 there were quite a few weird things I had to address. My Emacs is installed via Gentoo Portage. The USE flags I have set (to enable/disable features at build time) essentially configure my Emacs to be like Lucid Emacs builds. Here’s the USE flags: Xaw3d acl alsa athena cairo dbus dynamic-loading gif gmp gui imagemagick inotify jpeg lcms libxml2 png source ssl svg threads tiff toolkit-scroll-bars xft xpm zlib -aqua -games -gconf -gfile -gpm -gsettings -gtk -gzip-el -harfbuzz -json -kerberos -livecd -m17n-lib -mailutils -motif -selinux -sound -systemd -wide-int -xwidgets Make note that cairo support is enabled.

Using an old Supermicro IPMI to configure broken networking

Monday, Aug 9, 2021

The goal of this post is to demonstrate the usefulness of IPMI even in hobbyist or personal use. Anything that means less touching physical machines to power cycle them, or fix network misconfigurations, can save a lot of time. I had broken my NAS’s networking by adding a bridge and attaching the existing ethernet device to it. I forgot to configure the ethernet device to not try to fetch an IP address (via DHCP), but instead only fetch an IP address on the bridge itself.

No need to reinstall your OS

Thursday, Jul 8, 2021

A fantastic “feature” of Linux, BSD, and even Windows 10 is you don’t really need to reinstall to migrate an installation to a new computer. A common misunderstanding is if you get a new PC, you must use the new OS install, or install a new copy of your OS. If you’re intending on replacing an existing PC (and disposing of or re-purposing the old one), there is probably no need to reinstall your OS and deal with user data migration.