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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Sunday, May 15, 2022
Digital Ocean’s App Platform works fairly well with Racket. To activate this service, create a git repository with a Dockerfile in it. Your app will be ran as a container built from the Dockerfile and hosted by Digital Ocean. It appears this platform handles load balancing and scaling. These are good value prospects when considering hosting on this platform.
If you wish to use a custom domain you can also do so, such as was the case with p.
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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:
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Saturday, Jan 29, 2022
GitLab has recently locked down the accessibility to free CI/CD minutes. You now need to provide a Credit Card to prove you’re a human. Apparently cryptofriends were using the CI/CD minutes to mine for cryptocurrencies. Huh… if I had lesser ethics I’d probably do the same thing! Kind of brilliant to be honest. Anyway, the end result is if you want users to contribute to your project they need to either provide a CC or better yet, you can set up private GitLab runners.
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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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Sunday, Mar 14, 2021
I seem to have a lot of suggestions to share with friends about managing disks on a linux livecd. Here are some of the tips I’d like to share. See the table of contents above for a breakdown of the topics discussed.
Some disk related topics are out of scope for this article, as they deserve their own blog post. The topics not covered include partitioning, setting up a boot loader, using LVM2 or ZFS, that sort of thing.
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