Tag: Computing

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).

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Nix / NixOS misconceptions

Sunday, Aug 6, 2023

I’ve been using Nix for a year now. It’s been going fairly well, by the way. Here are some misconceptions I’ve had to overcome to become a more productive Nixer. False: You can’t deploy Nix software to Docker or Kubernetes False. If you can push to a docker registry such as docker.io, you can deploy to Docker or Kubernetes using Nix. You can use dockerTools.buildImage to build a docker image from Nix.

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My first game jam

Thursday, Jun 8, 2023

Source lives here. Play it here. In a joint effort, Aliasing and myself have created a novel top-down action rogue-lite for the 2023 Spring Lisp Game Jam. Aliasing is an experienced game dev so in a way, I was along for the ride. Still, I managed to contribute some game mechanics, features, unit testing, CI/CD that deploys to super-rogue.workinprogress.top on every commit. This was a fun devops exercise for me - Aliasing mentioned to me that I helped keep him on track with the addition of automated testing and per-commit deploys to a website (it makes it easy to play-test pull requests).

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Sillypaste migrated to fly.io

Thursday, May 18, 2023

I’ve been operating Sillypaste (source code) - a simple Django pastebin created for dogfooding. In this post I hope to capture some of the painpoints of working with Django, Python, Heroku, and the migration to fly.io. Ever since Heroku sold its soul to SalesForce its been on the decline. Customer service is worse than ever, giving wonderful canned responses to most questions. It used to be free to host Sillypaste on heroku, now is a $17/mo ordeal.

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Can 4GiB meet your needs in 2023?

Monday, Feb 6, 2023

Figure 1: your computer on low memory TL;DR: yes. You can throw more swap at most processes and it’ll eventually finish… Eventually. Last year I warranty-ed a Dell XPS 13 with 32 GiB of RAM, all specced out. Sidenote: I wouldn’t recommend the Dell XPS 13, at least in 4K. The laptop gets anywhere from 1-3 hours of real world usage and gets hot as most Macbooks. The Dell XPS 13 4K is not a viable product.

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New computer checklist

Monday, Jan 9, 2023

Here’s a small outline of how I validate used computers as “usable” and “in working condition”. My hope is these steps help computer users spot “lemons” - machines that shouldn’t be depended on because they don’t work all the time. Basics Before stress testing or examining SMART data, consider the following checklist: Turn it on and ensure you can access the firmware settings/BIOS. F2 and Delete seem like the most common keys.

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#lang tinybasic

Wednesday, Jul 27, 2022

For the Lang Party Summer 2022, I wrote a BASIC interpreter. It took a bit of mental gymnastics and learning on my part. In this post I hope to share some of the experience in implementing this interpreter. For the curious, the code lives on GitHub. Figure 1: A TinyBASIC session in Cool Retro Term Try it out! Want to try it out? Run raco pkg install --auto tinybasic to install it.

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