Friday, Apr 24, 2020
Zathura is a fantastic PDF viewer. It also supports Postscript, DjVu, and Comicbook archive. In particular it supports using mupdf for the backend, so it’s rather fast (unlike poppler, used by evince and friends). Here is a screenshot of Zathura:
Figure 1: screenshot of zathura
Now that I’ve introduced Zathura. I want to talk about a problem I had recently. I wanted to print a document a couple weeks ago, but found whenever I issued a :print command in Zathura, the program would crash.
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Saturday, Apr 18, 2020
During these interesting times, I figure it would be a good idea to describe how I’ve been keeping myself busy, bugs I’ve fixed, and some of the daily tasks/routines that keep my day structured.
For context: I moved house on the weekend of March 21st, which is a couple weeks before the Covid-19 fiasco became a front-and-center concern for my geographical region. I am finishing my undergrad in computer science — this is my last semester.
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Sunday, Mar 29, 2020
I recently moved, and my new abode has an Ubiquiti Amplifi LAN. The rationale is this mesh-based WiFi network eliminates the need to install Ethernet between Wireless Access Points (APs). It works surprisingly well. In this post I document how I extended this network so I could place my networked devices all on the same Ethernet segment, without needing to wire it to the Amplifi base station.
The idea is the network should look like this:
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Tuesday, Jan 7, 2020
Previously I detailed how I set up blog.winny.tech using GitHub for source code hosting and Caddy’s git plugin for deployment. This works well and I used a similar setup with my homepage. The downside is I host the static web content and I am tied to using Caddy.1 I imagine simpler is better, so I opted to host my static sites — https://winny.tech/ & https://blog.winny.tech/ — with GitLab pages.
What’s wrong with Caddy?
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Wednesday, Dec 25, 2019
Most of my workstations & laptops require a passphrase typed in to open the encrypted root filesystem. So my steps to booting are as follows:
Power on machine Wait for FDE passphrase prompt Type in FDE passphrase Wait for boot to complete and automatic XFCE session to start Since I need to know when the computer is ready to accept the passphrase, it is important the framebuffer is usable during the early part of the boot.
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Friday, Aug 2, 2019
Awhile back I noticed my personal mnt/ directory, my (empty) personal tmp/ directory, and a few symbolic links disappeared from my home directory. I only noticed because I use unison1 to synchronize my desktop and laptop homedirs. The actual amount of removed directories and symbolic links were staggering, and it costed me five minutes of extra effort to search through the unison UI to ignore files I don’t want to synchronize.
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Tuesday, Jan 22, 2019
As a heavy user of SSH to manage computers and IRC via command line clients, the most used application on my phone besides the web browser is a SSH client. Previously I have used Prompt and it worked, but barely. My issues with Prompt include crashing on emoji spam that is common in certain IRC channels, very slow terminal rendering to the point that watching the output of compiling a large package will cause Prompt to lag uncontrollably for tens of seconds, and a relatively un-intuitive UI.
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