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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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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Thursday, Oct 26, 2023
Hello, my name is Winny and welcome to my honest review of Sway, a i3wm compatible Wayland compositor. Its primary appeal is a compositor experience that is easy to install, and familiar to i3 users. For my usage, it is one of the few compositors flexible enough to deploy on older hardware.
Startup Sway does require a bit of effort and time to get it in a usable state from the stock configuration.
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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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Thursday, Mar 9, 2023
Figure 1: Pre-commit running within GitLab CI
I’ve been using pre-commit as my tool to set up hooks to run when I commit to Git. It helps me catch gotchas such as fixing line endings, fixing whitespace, refusing to commit on linter errors, and so on. Often, I’ve noticed with working on teams is it’s fairly easy for a new contributor to forget to set up pre-commit on their development machine.
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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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Thursday, Sep 29, 2022
I had a need to host image galleries online. I researched the cost structures of a few providers, then settled on AWS S3 storage and AWS Cloudfront CDN. The twist is I have all the cloud configuration managed in Terraform, so it’s easy to recreate the same sort of setup for various projects.
Hosting provider cost structure After reviewing the bandwidth limits for a static website with a lot of large images, I came up with the following datapoints.
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