Recent content on arkadi-cloud
The Problem On June 5th, my personal instance of Gotosocial felt really slow. I tried restarting the docker container, but that didn’t help. I checked what was happening in htop and CPU utilization was 100% for all 4 cores. Bots were scraping 7MB/s in data. My blog was getting hammered for some reason. Through lots of trial and error I tried many things to fight it. Here’s what helped…
I’ve always wanted a NixOS VPS but many providers don’t have an easy to install NixOS ISO. Neither does Oracle Cloud. I did this 4 times until it worked. This guide is based on this . I am recreating it here lest it disappear. Guide to Setup NixOS Instance Create a basic Ubuntu minimal x86 instance. (1 x86 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 50GB boot drive) Login to your new VPS. Read through the…
My main gaming desktop has two strange problems that are bedeviling me. One is a boot problem and one is a shutdown problem. Does anybody have any idea what’s wrong? And/or how to fix this? Boot Problem (Flick switch on back of power supply. Due to shutdown problem.) Press power button on case. System pauses during boot with the message: New CPU installed! Please enter Setup to configure…
There are lots of shitty things in the UK but it seems like the UK is kicking butt in renewables? That’s awesome. Analysis: Wind and solar have saved UK from gas imports worth £1.7bn since Iran war began In the UK, “wind and solar have generated more electricity than fossil fuels for a record 15 months in a row. […] this included a full winter season for the first time in 2025-26. 50.8% of…
I recently succumbed and bought an Xteink X4 from Aliexpress. My primary ereader is my Kobo Clara HD but it has become quite aged. I bought it in 2018. I love it but it has its problems. The battery can’t hold a charge longer than a week. The back is starting to fall off. It uses microUSB for charging, too. Icky. Due to these reasons, I thought I’d give this cute little Xteink X4 a…
I have been looking for a simple ZFS encrypted root guide on the internet. It doesn’t seem to exist. I am putting emphasis on the word simple. I decided to sacrified my weekend and mental health to make it happen. Before attempting this, please read these links, so you have some idea about what you’re doing and are aware of the main steps needed to install NixOS manually. It looks…
I’ve had a productive spurt of energy and improved a lot of things in my homelab lately. I have an automated way to keep docker containers updated. I installed a custom caddy plugin on my vps server. I have gotten better at reverse proxying through caddy. I even setup an AI blocker/tarpit/poisoner for my websites. Auto-update Docker Containers I used to use Watchtower to auto-update my…
Despite or maybe due to the state of the world, I’ve kept up my reading regimen. I love reading. bedtime reading - 1-2 hours with my Kobo Clara HD lunchtime reading - 30-40 minutes with a paper book Though I’ve kept up my reading habit, I haven’t been blogging reviews as much as I used to. This makes me sad, but life is also busy. I accept it. I am now also using Bookwyrm.social…
I had lots of time to fool around with my homelab stuff over the lunar new year. Here are some things I worked on lately. Pihole + Unbound I run PiHole at home to block ads at the DNS level on my NanoPi R2S . Lately, there were lots of random reboots. I have had this running 24/7 for a few (?) years using the same SD card. I hypothesized that my SD card was failing, so I bought a new SD card. I…
Goodreads is bad If you didn’t already know, Goodreads is bad. It was bought by Amazon in 2013. It hasn’t changed much since then. It’s still ugly. I’m sure Amazon is harvesting all that sweet user data in the background, too. I quit Goodreads awhile ago and switched to using Obsidian markdown to track my reading. At the end of every year, I post the results of my Reading…
The one month holiday passed by like a flash. I start work tomorrow. I had a great break though. EDIT: I’m back at work for almost a week now. This is how hard my job hits me when it starts. I will get back to the grind tomorrow and won’t have so much time for blogging, so this shall be my last blog post of the holiday. Movies Holidays are a golden time for me. My family often goes to…
1001 Albums Update unfortunately, I’ve hit a bit of a roadbump with this mission. Now that it is lunar new year, I’m getting distracted by other tasks and projects. Also, after making my post about my music process, someone told me about the program beets . I might have to change how I get, organize, and tag my music, again. Bluetooth Vulnerability recently, there has been a discovery…
2026 has started on a depressing note. You just have to search social media for #uspol if you don’t believe me. Somehow, I stumbled onto the book “1001 Albums to Hear Before You Die” (1001 Albums). I enjoy listening to music from the past and relish new challenges. This year, I declare I shall begin the 1001 albums music challenge! I have started from the oldest albums as I am…
I recently made some major changes to my music workflow, switching from spotify-downloader to YouTube downloader (yt-dlp) + metadata-remote . + f2 batch renamer . My previous workflow: Open Distrobox, use spotdl through pip/pipx download music edit id3 tags manually in a music app rsync to server ssh to server rsync again to jellyfin folder Too many steps and editing id3 tags manually was a major…
Why? I didn’t think I would buy a Frame.work laptop after the controversy about one of the Framework dude being dumb and sponsoring DHH, who I didn’t know who he was but after I looked him up is a garbage person. However, tablets are even worse. Expensive: iPad Air $18,921 NT , Galaxy Tab $22,080 NT They aren’t expensive in dollars, but they are expensive for how limited they…
It’s the time of year that many of us feel the need to make new years resolutions. People make dramatic proclamations they will eat healthier, or visit the gym, or read more books. This is great, and no shade on those people who make resolutions. I do have a suggestion for people who wish to make resolutions: track your progress. How do you do that? Log it. If you do it, write it down. This…
2025 was a turbulent year. I am still proud of the breadth and amount of books I’ve read. I don’t think I’ll hit the highs of 100 books a year anymore, and that’s ok. Along with books, I’ve played more video games, done computer homelabbing things, and watched TV. I tried Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but didn’t really care for it.…
In an odd change of pace, I’ll do a post about one of my favourite authors, Sir Terry Pratchett. I’ve been going non-stop on reading his books this year. Not sure why, but I’ve been looking for fantasy and sci-fi to escape into. (the world is in such a great place right now, eh? Possibly a reason?) My first experience reading Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series was reading…
I had tried to convert some existing NixOS systems to Nixbook a few times but I always ended up on a strange feeling ‘dirty’ system. I decided to give it a fair shake and install it from scratch on one of my test laptops. Install I installed nixbook with the custom ISO that Mr. Kelly has made. It makes the experience so smooth and simple. I was really impressed, though, in general,…
This President is showing how creaky and terrible USA democracy and the US state is. So much of what was done before by other presidents was based on ’norms’, not rule. He’s basically beta testing US democracy and finding, many, many holes. I’m a teacher. You never, ever trust kids. Kids are sneaky. A kid will always find some way to exploit the system. Also, as a Canadian…
Mafia 3 is a fun game that I recently picked up for a few bucks on Steam. It gives you the feeling of being a gangster as you slowly build up your empire while driving around the city and killing people or destroying property. There are some rough edges though such as long and annoying cut scenes and repetitive missions. Story You are a black Vietnam special forces vet that came back to New…
Link Dump - September 2025 AI Bullshit Is this AI stuff still going on? Only idiots are using AI. Here are some news articles I found interesting over the past few months. “ In a landmark study , OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits.”…
So you bought a Kobo? Good job. Here are some links to make your Kobo more free and stop using built-in Kobo software. Installation Instructions Visit this forum thread to find a ‘one click install script’ (check the first and second post). It will install KFMon and NickelMenu which are launchers. It also bundles KOReader and/or Plato. What are these ereader apps? Plato is a document…
Dorfromantik video game What a little gem of a game! It looks boring, almost simplistic but it’s better than it appears on the surface. I’ve only had it for 2 weeks and have already played 13 hours. I had my eye on this game for a few months but it was too expensive in the beginning. So, I added it to my To Buy pile (aka My Wishlist). Luckily, Steam regularly has sales. When it…
Link Dump! I encounter all sorts of interesting things on the Fediverse everyday. I don’t have time to do anything with it immediately all the time. I do make sure I click the Bookmark button to save it for later. Then at some future date in the future, I go back and digest the neat things I found online. I will start doing these link dumps when I can. I have seen other people do it and…
NixOS is Actually Good* I have gone back and forth in my love for NixOS. My journey to loving the immutable operating system has gone from Fedora Silverblue -> Bluefin/Bazzite -> NixOS. I got tempted over the NixOS side after trying it out on one of my low spec machines (4GB) and seeing how GNOME is actually usable if you strip out lots of garbage like the Software app. I also loved how I could…
I heard about this book because Facebook tried to block the book from coming out. That intrigued me. What don’t they want us to know? Then, once I saw the book cover of a shark fin in a blue rounded rectangle - I was sold! Once I began to read the book, I felt a connection to the author. I also came of age during the 90s, the birth of the internet. I also felt that these digital tools and…
…with the power of Tailscale & Caddy! Intro I’ve been trying to get a server running behind Tailscale for a long time. I wanted https://hostname.TS-FUNNYNAME.ts.net to point to a server within my local network but be accessible on the internet. It turns out that is very hard. While attempting to achieve this goal, I discovered TSDProxy . This is a docker reverse proxy for Tailscale…
Yunohost –> NixOS My ‘pie in the sky’ goal is to move my Yunohost server to NixOS ‘one day’. Is Yunohost terrible? Of course not. I just would like to have my server settings locked in so when disaster strikes - I’m ready. I also like learning new things. I need to figure out lots of little things to achieve this goal though. ZFS on root Remote unlock ZFS via…
I followed the Simple NixOS ZFS on root installation guide . There were a few papercuts or at least some parts that you still need to figure out. Use lsblk and check which drive you want to install the OS. Should be something like /dev/sda or /dev/nvme0n1 . Save the name of the drive in a variable. DISK=/dev/sda Delete all data on that drive. fdisk $DISK –> d (to delete partition), do this…
I haven’t made an update here for months. Why does life seem to get busier and busier as you get older? In that time there’s been lots of small battles won and lost but here are some things I wish to share and make a permanent record of for you and my future self. Super Key with Stickers I really detest having a Windows key on my computers so I bought these stickers . You can cover up…
What a perfect beach read! I enjoyed reading this over the lunar new year break. This is a historical fiction about North Korea, the only country in the world that is still shrouded in mystery. There is a Korean American protagonist who is half African American, too. I liked that extra wrinkle to the story. She struggles to cope with a tragedy from her past - her sister disappeared from a beach in…
I was quite productive in catching up on TV shows during Lunar New Year. I don’t watch lots of my ‘own’ shows unless I have time off from work so the winter break is a special time for me. Jack Ryan (Season 2) I used to devour these Tom Clancy books when I was in high school. I think they’ve done a great job of translating these books into a TV show. I like the actors…
The dream in NixOS is that you can setup a lot of things declaratively and never have to ‘set it up’ again from scratch. You can do lots of GNOME settings with dconf but I decided to start on an easy task: user avatar, and the desktop background. I got lots of tips on how to do this from this blog . The TLDR; is that you can use the command dconf watch / to see what changing some…
The US government doesn’t want you to read this because these aren’t the words of a crazy person. This is from a regular person who’s had enough and just wishes America had health care. Why won’t the mainstream media publish this? Shameful. Thanks to Ken Klippenstein who published this. “To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our…
These days, I primarily use three distros: Bluefin, Bazzite, and NixOS. I love Bluefin for many reasons small chunk rpm-ostree upgrades, sane yet opinionated defaults with extensions and pre-installed flatpaks but I still have a few gripes. High idle RAM usage. In my own scientific experiments between Bluefin and NixOs GNOME, I find that the RAM usage is high in Bluefin. Using htop , I check how…
Krita + Drawing Tablet I bought my children a drawing tablet for Christmas because they are very interested in art and drawing. I didn’t think it was that incredible until I started going through a Krita tutorial with them. I felt like a kid discovering computers again. Forget AI and other bullshit, this is tech that empowers human creativity! Krita is an incredible digital painting and…
After spending 2 hours trying to make my flake config more modular , I had a realization. This isn’t fun right now. I did learn how to make my own modules and use libmkDefault and lib.mkEnableOption. I have learned a lot about git, too. I even had forgejo running for a bit in an attempt to not use Github. However, I am going to simplify my current setup, so I can focus more on learning Nix.…
All the books I’ve read in 2024! I read 57 books this year.It was a good year. I didn’t read as many books as I hoped but that’s OK. My lunch hours at work have been used for watching TV. I don’t often get to watch TV shows because our family watches TV together. I’ve also gotten into learning about NixOS which means a lot of computer learning and watching YouTube…
I realize I haven’t posted a book review since Jun 18, the 25th novel I read this year. Shame! I have been reading since then but have fallen out of the habit of blogging. Here is a quick round out of some of the books I’ve read since then before the new year hits and I release my awesomely incredible books I read list. The Lazarus Heist - From Hollywood to High Finance: Inside North…
I recently watched Meet the Parents. This is noteworthy because I don’t often rewatch movies. I must be hitting middle age because the pull of nostalgia is strong. I want to rexperience the Good Things from the past again. Ostensibly to share them with my family, but also for my enjoyment. I even bought my son a Game Boy-esque device that he can play retro games on. Of course, I will be…
I live in Taiwan. I sometimes need to type in Chinese or allow others to use my computer to type in Chinese, so I need to install non-English input sources. In the other Fedora based systems I use (Bluefin, Bazzite), I install the package ibus-chewing and it works. Since switching to NixOS, I’ve had trouble getting the chewing engine working. I have gotten Inteligent Pinyin (libpinyin) and…
I read lots of NixOS configs to try to understand how to use one set of configuration file swith 2 machines. This blog gave me some inspiration This is how I imagine having 2 systems (bluenix & nixos) update with one nix config through one flake and reusing some modules (Is that what we call .nix files?) { description = 'NixOS configuration' ; inputs = { nixpkgs . url =…
I realized I wouldn’t ever really have the full experience of NixOS until I use it everyday. I converted 3 laptops to NixOS . I use one of these machines everyday at work (bluenix) and another one sometimes at home (nixos). Tailscale Weirdness Tailscale works but there was an error message. After some investigation , it is a kernel bug. It has since been fixed. $ tailscale status # Health…
I have become more than Nix curious. I have converted a few more machines to NixOS to get more hands-on experience because I don’t think I’ll learn it more if I don’t use it. I am sharing my NixOS configs here to hopefully help others and maybe even get some tips. Bluenix My daily driver machine I use at work. https://github.com/tootbrute/nixos-bluenix Nixos Another extra Asus…
Nextcloud Desktop Sync On my Bazzite machine, the Nextcloud Sync was timing out when syncing my ebooks folder. I thought it could be related to the folder being too large, or even something with ZFS. It turns out it was a bug with the Nextcloud Desktop client . To fix the problem, I increased the keepalive_request and timeout settings for my NGINX reverse proxy. I’m on Yunohost, so I changed…
Goal Start a Mastodon (fediverse) server 1 run by, moderated by, and used by expats and other English speakers living in Taiwan. 2 if you build it, they will come… 3 I have the technical know how to operate a mastodon server. I’m currently operating Why? It would be great to have our own piece of the internet. A place to discuss the best new restaurants. A place to buy and sell things…
First there was crypto, then NFTs, and now AI. Fuck! Some great articles and opinions of why AI is bullshit. “LLMs pose a unique risk to science, education, democracy, and society that current legal frameworks did not anticipate. This is what we call ‘careless speech’ or speech that lacks appropriate care for truth. Spreading careless speech causes subtle, immaterial harms that are difficult to…
Collabora Online/Nextcloud Office I have been on a mission to #degoogle my life since I’ve started self-hosting. Though, Google Docs is a thing I haven’t gotten away from yet. This month I took another crack at it by trying to install Collabora Online for my Nextcloud server. Collabora Online needs two parts to function: the Collabora Online server , and the Nextcloud Office app . I…
The Beginning After hearing about ZFS for the past year, I decided to investigate it. I read the book FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS by Michael W Lucas . It is an excellent book and highlights the power and reliability of the ZFS filesystem. A must read before continuing! I have a 3TB RAID10 running on my server at home. I decided I wanted to change this to a ZFS mirror drive. I might make a double mirror…