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.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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