Sunday, Sep 8, 2024
Previously I introduced the reader to ShellCheck. In this post I detail how I use Flycheck in Emacs and offer an Emacs function to automatically suppress Shellcheck errors at the current line.
I’m an avid Emacs user and it follows that I’ve set up editor customization to exude the most from ShellCheck. If you, dear reader, are not an Emacs user, I cannot help you! Please, for the love of shell scripts, ensure ShellCheck works within your preferred text editor, lest you wish to ship edgecased buggy scripts!
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Sunday, Sep 1, 2024
In this post I hope to convince the reader on the merits of ShellCheck. Stay tuned for more posts about using ShellCheck.
On Shellscripting Shell scripting is a of passion of mine. Preferably Bash (here’s a guide). (POSIX sh a.k.a. Bourne shell works too, albeit with more effort thanks to diminished versatility when compared to Bash.) The shell scripting language family has many warts as the languages were designed for both real-time interaction and automation programming.
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Tuesday, Jul 23, 2024
Turns out my NAS is vulnerable to the SSH vulnerability which allows anyone to log into your host with enough time, guaranteed. Dubbed regreSSHion (CVE-2024-6387), it affects a host of different OpenSSH version ranges. If one has OpenSSH 9.8p1 or later, one is totally fine.
Unfortunately, the NAS is still on NixOS 23.11. The NAS remains on NixOS, but all my other devices have been migrated off to Debian Testing.
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Monday, Jul 15, 2024
Here’s a few notes on CPUID and /proc/cpuinfo. I made a table for quick reference.
What is CPUID? On x86 and amd64 CPUs, there is a large swathe of differences in features available to the software. Some CPUs ship with AES encryption support, others ship with virtualization support, almost all ship with a collection of SIMD (single instruction multiple data) instructions. The name of the game is to reduce CPU execution times using specialized instructions.
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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.
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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.
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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 #!
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