Recent content on ascia.tech
Somewhere around the end of May, I switched from Firefox to Vivaldi. It’s not
been optimal but at least pages are loading now… I was getting endless
Cloudflare verification loops and some sites were just not loading (even on a
fresh bare nekkid install so don’t @ me, nerds). Then
there’s all the *gestures wildly at everything* that Mozilla is…
I gave a talk at NWA Tech Fest called “Rootless Containers with Podman.” This
is the version that I congealed from the slides and my notes for the people
who asked for it afterwards (and like a month later because I’m forgetful).
The tone is probably a little too expository because I
chopped stuff directly out of my speaking script with minor edits, so try to…
This is yet another AI post. I will try not to let this turn into a trend as I
am just as exhausted with the ideas as everybody else. I’m writing this out
publicly because I’m noticing a shift in the way I search for information and
how I organize notes. 
 In My Current AI and LLM Usage post, I
talked a about how I was dipping my toes into this AI mess. I was just…
In Part 1 , I walked through how I deploy
rootless podman containers as systemd user units in my homelab using jinja2
templates. I also said I don’t recommend that approach for anything new and
that I replaced it with Quadlets in some client deployments. This post is
about that replacement. I hope to migrate my homelab to quadlets in the
near future but inertia is a…
When I started writing this post, it grew substantially larger than intended.
Initially I set out to document how I’ve moved from deploying podman
containers using jinja2 templates to using quadlets but it exposed an idea
that’s been in the back of my head for a bit: SmallOps. General
sysadmin/devoops stuff that isn’t big enterprise and isn’t directly MSP…
I first learned about devpod through Bluefin. It feels like only a few months ago but it’s probably been longer. I was excited to try it out because some teams I worked on were using GitHub Codespaces and Gitpod.
I guess I was a bit slow to come around to the whole cloud native and containerization craze but the
idea of devcontainers made a lot of sense to me (even if they originated…
When I was working FTE, I would often have blocks of time at work that I could
use to study and “sharpen the saw.” Often, my employer would pay for various
educational services and courses for me. They’d also set aside professional
development time for me to utilize those resources. 
 Since returning to freelance work, I’ve not had such a luxury. For…
I like to sit and lay on the floor. Ever since I was a kid, I preferred sitting
on the floor to furniture and I’ve carried that into adulthood. I’ve been
sleeping on a Japanese-style futon for many years for similar reasons. 
 Office chairs have generally been fine. I’ve tried all sorts of models, even
kneeling ones, and none of them stood out as something I…
Yes, yes, AI/LLM bad… anyway: much like the rest of the world, I have been
trying to navigate this AI/LLM explosion. There is a lot of awful to it all
and a lot of utility. I tire of the AI doomers and AI hype crowds (as well as
corps pushing it into absolutely everything). There are so many posts about
how AI bags up puppies and beats them to death or posts about how AI…
I’ve wanted to put together a post about my self hosting and media consumption
for a while now. I also feel like an annual self-hosting review would be a
neat thing for reflection. I didn’t intend to combine these posts but a few
events recently caused me to change a lot of my home infrastructure. Because
that was media driven, I figured I’d combine them. 
 I…
This is a deeply personal post. Typically I like to keep this blog technical in
nature but I recently did an exercise that I felt could be useful to others.
I’m not a terribly introspective person and I’m generally content with my life
but once in a while the mood of self-review hits me. 
 I was listening to the TED Radio Hour espisode on “What can you control in…
I am still running Bluefin and Bazzite on my computers (and loving it). I’ve
got Bluefin on my work laptop and Bazzite on my personal desktop. Being a
freelancer, the lines between work and personal sometimes blur so I have less
separation between my environments than I did when I was a full time
employee. Most of my separation now is less physical and hardware based…
Today I was tinkering with chiaki-ng 
and ran into a bug , so I
decided to downgrade the package to see when the issue was
introduced. I had it installed as a Flatpak but I figured testing it with the
AppImage releases would be easier. I ran into crashes with those, so I started
looking into how to downgrade Flatpaks. 
 I learned that I could use the remote info command to…
On a recent project, I needed to create a bespoke VM disk image. Normally I
would either use something like Alpine if it needed to be lightweight, or an
RPM based distro for something heavier. In this case, the project called for
Ubuntu for compatibility on various levels. 
 While doing some research on configuration, I bumped into
 Ubuntu cloud images . I had used…
When I learned that the ACM was going to
 drop Pluralsight support , I
decided I should finish up some of the courses I was taking. One of those was
a basic Kubernetes course that I wanted to use as a refresher. I often go
back to entry-level documentation so that I can reinforce my understanding of
the basics. 
 I realized that I’d need a k8s cluster for the projects…
It occurred to me the other day that I’ve been on IRC for at least 30 years,
and possibly much longer. I first discovered IRC by way of a BBS and have been
hooked ever since. Most of that time has been by way of clients in a shell but
occasionally I enjoyed a GUI client, especially in recent years. 
 About a decade ago, I moved from irssi to weechat because of its relay…
Several months ago I had a client that was migrating from ESXi to Proxmox. I
was unable to rebuild some of their servers due to them being older Windows
servers that were definitely out of support. Note that I don’t recommend
running in this configuration but these machines are air-gapped and are being
upgraded over time as the equipment they support is being replaced. 
…
For a few months I have been having trouble with the guests on one of my
Proxmox hosts. Regardless of drivers and settings for virtio network
interfaces or guest operating systems, I was getting a solid 900Mbps up but a
sluggish 5Mbps down on all of the guests while the host had 1Gbps symmetrical.
This was one of the more bizarre networking challenges I had encountered to
date.…
I decided to play with Crystal a bit a couple of
weeks ago. I used to use Ruby quite heavily, so the syntax was really natural
to me. It was super enjoyable and I used the opportunity to explore
devcontainers as well. 
 Back when I first started using Bluefin for development, I tried to get up and
running with DevPod because I really enjoyed Code Spaces and GitPod. I ran…
Post 007 of #100DaysToOffload is centered around Android weirdness! 
 Call of Duty: Mobile has an event this season that is a crossover with the Gundam franchise. I wanted to check out all the big stompy robots so I re-installed this massive game. I have enjoyed COD:M in the past but I’ve found it difficult to play because I my eyesight is poor and my phone screen is definitely small…
Post 006 of #100DaysToOffload! 
 I have been running Bazzite on my desktop and Bluefin on my work laptop for a little over a year now. When I replaced my work laptop, I ended up installing Bazzite on it for consistency across my machines. It turns out that the developer experience is much better on Bluefin so a simple rebase was all I needed to swap out the system. 
 One sudo rpm-ostree…
In today’s short and sweet #100DaysToOffload (post 005!), I would like to show off an #ansible playbook for creating VMs in #proxmox. 
 I wrote this playbook several weeks ago when I was trying to stretch the limits of what I could do with Ansible. It would be much better to do this with #opentofu or #terraform but I thought this was a fun exercise. 
 A few ways I would improve this…
In my job search , I noticed a ton of listings for Go developers. I stumbled upon Go back in 2012 because I was a bit of a plan9 fan and learned that Rob Pike was working on the language. I tinkered with Go and I loved it so much that I began introducing it at work. Along the way, I also I started golang-weekly . 
 Eventually, I handed off the mailing list to an Internet stranger and then it…
Post 003 of #100DaysToOffload 
 I think that this topic has been covered by a lot of more visible people already. I’m not sure I have anything of value to add to the conversation. I wanted to write this more as a means of me clearing my own head about the topic than I did to provide any sort of solutions. 
 I think this divide started for me decades ago when I switched my note taking…
I saw this post by way of @joel@fosstodon.org and replied that I thought it was a fun read. I was prodded to give it a go, myself. I’m way behind on #100DaysToOffload so here’s post 002… 
 Do you floss your teeth? 
 Nightly. Dental health is important for complete health and prevention of a lot of things is easy. 
 Tea, coffee, or water? 
 Water, then coffee. I…
Post 001 of #100DaysToOffload 
 The first computer I remember having regular access to was a Tandy 1000HX. It was well beyond its prime when I got my hands on it and the details of how I acquired it are very fuzzy. I believe it came from a flea market or a yard sale or something of that nature. I just remember its weight on the dining room table. 
 I had seen other computers at school and…
I have managed to keep this blog and my Mastodon Account around for longer than I had intended. My Pixelfed account and a couple of others have sort of fallen by the wayside but I’m pretty excited that I’ve not nuked these two yet. 
 I have had dozens of accounts like these through the years. The online presence, screaming into the public void. I pretty consistently feel exposed…
I seem to go through cycles with gaming. I’ll get fixated on a title or genre and put it down for a while. Occasionally some friends will pick up a title or platform and I’ll dive into it with them and then abandon it. Coming off of my Classic DOOM binge last year, I figured this would be a year when I walked away from gaming again for a while. It seems as if the opposite has happened:…
“AI BAD!” , IT’S LLM NOT AI!" , FURTHER ANGRY INTERNET NOISES! 
 Now that we have that out of the way… 
 So far my journey into the land of LLM has been relatively pedestrian, I think. I waited several months after OpenAI’s ChatGPT hype peaked before I started tinkering with it. I signed up for a paid account for a couple of months and found it to be not very…
Earlier this year, I decided to take the leap and install Bazzite on my Desktop. For the last several years I had been using either Linux Mint or MX Linux on my daily driver. Curiosity got the best of me after listening to people discuss atomic distros on a couple of podcasts and I decided to try one out. 
 Over time, I have had less desire to tinker with my computer and I generally prefer a…
Through the years I have been quite hardline with my usage of technolgy. I was only interested in Linux, or I was only interested in Free Software, or I was only interested in some particular hardware, or the old way was better, etc. I have mellowed out so much in recent years that many of my friends have commented on the change in my personality. Some of this, I think, is because I’ve…
I have been frequenting a gas station a couple blocks from my house to get the occasional decaf coffee in the evenings when I’ve cut my caffeine stream off. They’ve snared me, the valued customer, with their rewards program. I’ve been chasing that “FREE” sixth coffee for a while now. 
 While waiting on the machine to dispense my tepid brown water, I like to…
There’s plenty of posts out there describing professional burnout and open source burnout. This post covers both and neither at the same time. I don’t intend to propose any solutions but instead to provide an undedited stream of consciousness relating my experience with both. 
 I’ve come to view burnout as a cyclical thing. I’ve spent somewhere around two decades in…
A brief but fun post from my ancient altbit.org blog back on July 7th, 2007. I used to be a frequent user of dc but in recent years I’ve replaced it with galculator. Back then I used to try to stretch the limits of the command where possible. I discovered this obvious but useful feature in the process. 
 It was also around this time that I was running World of Warcraft on FreeBSD. Those…
Back in 1997 I picked up a copy of the first Diablo game. I didn’t get it on release and I’m not entirely sure how I learned about it because I wasn’t heavily involved in any sort of gaming save for the occasional BBS door game or whatever shovelware I happened to come across. I also don’t recall where I purchased it. It seems likely that it was from one of a handful of mom…
Back in the early 2000s, I owned an NEC MobilePro 770 and managed to get NetBSD running on it. During that time, I posted the following page about it. This is the most recent iteration that the Wayback Machine was able to fetch. Note that several links are probably broken. I have made a few edits so that it fits this page better. 
 I hope to publish archives of my old sites and blogs again in…
Early in my time with computers, I relied heavily on vi because it was what was on the system and the manual told me to use it. I knew that pico was available when pine was installed but I found it to be more annoying to navigate than vi. Fast forward to when my tinkering became a job and I picked up vim. 
 I was seriously attached to that editor for a very long time, dragging dotfiles with me…
Inspired by WeblogPoMo2024 ( https://weblog.anniegreens.lol/weblog-posting-month-2024) , I’ve decided to try to blog again. I’m four days late to the party but there’s no time like the present. 
 Through the years, I’ve had many blogs and I almost always took them down after an arbitrary period of time. Typically this is because I’ve felt vain or exposed or I ran…
Many years ago I was severely burdened with work and organizational stress. There were other things going on in my head that complicated matters but I would work myself into exhaustion frequently. Instead of resting after that, I would commit myself to assisting various organizations that I belonged to with arbitrary tasks. Part of my healing process was to force myself to say no more frequently…
Ascia Technologies is the current home for the independent consulting work
I’ve done since 2006. Over the years I’ve moved between freelance work and
full-time roles, sometimes both at once. Either way, I embed directly with
teams to fix, build, and secure their systems. No account managers, no layers
of indirection; just me and your problem. I’ve worked across…