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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Freenode is dead, long live Freenode!

Wednesday, May 26, 2021

Note: this is my OWN opinion and not representative of any community entity. This is a summary of what I’ve experienced since the Freenode takeover. (The new Freenode is Libera.chat.) Drama? I prefer to not take sides in online drama, but I feel like I have to err on the side of not-nuking-and-paving IRC channels that have existed for decades. Here’s the summary of what’s happened, from my perspective: Guy with a bunch of money takes over a community operated network.

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Moving blog to ox-hugo

Saturday, Apr 3, 2021

It’s refresh time! Since January 2019 I’ve been blogging on this website and it’s been a rewarding experience. I originally researched many blogging solutions that involved using Emacs Org mode. I settled with org-static-blog and it worked pretty well for the most part. It gave just enough structure and mechanism to enable me to work on authoring content without dealing with the details of website building. Enter 2021, I have used org-static-blog for a couple years, and detailed some of my challenges with it below.

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Snarf YouTube videos off gather.town

Sunday, Mar 21, 2021

Gather.town is a very cool virtual conference platform. You pick an avatar, can voice chat, video chat, and watch presentations all while standing around in a virtual 2D space. A conference which I attended recently had all the talks pre-recorded and played back at live-time. This worked very well because the presenters would take their time and provide the best possible content. Within the virtual conference space, there was a way to play the videos back through moving your avatar into a specific location that is different for each video.

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