Updates to Bryce Vandegrift's blog
Note: This is a series of reflections that I wrote on Good Friday of 2025 (last year). I cannot remember why I didn’t publish this back then, so I waited until this year to do so. For those who are unaware, today is Good Friday 1 . Good Friday is traditionally a somber day of silence and reflection in remembrance of the passion and death of our Lord. Today I’ve been reflecting not just…
I got a new keyboard recently. I used to use a Unicomp Classic keyboard, however it slowly degraded and broke over time. I originally got the keyboard for ~$80, however Unicomp has now hiked the price of their keyboards to almost $200 ! Needless to say, but I don’t want to spend that much on a keyboard. So instead of getting a replacement Unicomp keyboard, I got a pretty good modern…
It’s about time that I got a new domain name for my website. My current/old domain name, brycevandegrift.xyz , is quite a cumbersome and unorthodox domain name. It’s not easy to remember and the .xyz domain name can also be somewhat confusing. Not only that, but I’ve had less tech literate people tell me that they thought my domain wasn’t actually a real domain name. Add to…
I’ve been wanting to post more articles on my blog, however I often find myself away from my computer or I often have more important tasks to take care of on my computer. Either way, I can’t write as many articles for my blog as I would like to on my computer. It wasn’t until I read a blog post by Ray Patrick (who has sadly taken down his blog) titled “In Praise of the…
At last, the final part to this series. You can catch up on parts 1 and 2 here and here respectively. Setting up an email server is no easy task, it takes a lot of configuration and sometimes trial and error. This guide should be good enough for small email servers that don’t get too many emails. So let’s go ahead and finally setup an email server for our system. Some Needed Packages…
I finally got around to writing part 2 of this series. If you have not read part 1 yet, then you can find it here . So now that we have our base server installed, we can go ahead and setup httpd to serve our website. Setup httpd Let’s go ahead and create a very simple http server using httpd just to make sure that everything is working properly. We can make a config file for httpd at…
This is the first part in a series of posts. Find part 2 and part 3 when they are ready For those of you who don’t follow my blog, in my previous blog post I talked about migrating my VPS to use OpenBSD instead of Debian stable. I recently finished migrating my VPS and would like to document the process in order to help anyone setting up their own OpenBSD server or VPS. Before we get…
Please note that on February 11, 2025 I will be migrating my VPS to a different operating system. This means that my website, email, and XMPP server will be down for most of the day. If you need to contact me please wait until Feburary 12, 2025. I’ve been using Debian stable on my VPS ever since I wrote my original post about getting a VPS, however I have decided that I would like to use…
I’ve recently decided that I’m going to do a livestream. This livestream is mostly just a test, but feel free to stop on by if you want to. I have no idea what to expect…so I’ll see how this goes. The stream will start on August 7 at 5:30 PM (EST). The link is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5eZXwXIrBI
A few years ago I was (and I still am) interested in electrical engineering and learning about how electricity works. I built circuits and repaired various different electronic devices around my house that were broken. My favorite part however, was working with high voltage. The cheapest and most effective gateway drug into high voltage that I encountered was actually the humble microwave oven.…
I’ve been putting off writing this blog post for 2 (almost 3) years now. There is a good reason for why I did that. Part of it was that I didn’t know how to put my experience into words until now, and the other part was just procrastination. So now I feel like I finally have the experience and knowledge to write about something that is very important to me. A Bit of Background In the…
Modern printers suck. They’re either overpriced, unreliable, ink/toner hogs, or a combination of all 3. Inkjet printers are cheap, have a good picture quality, and can print on many surfaces. However, they are also very unreliable and usually don’t last over 3 years. Not only that but inkjet printer cartridges can cost and arm and a leg, which is dumb considering ink (outside the…
I’ve been a Void Linux user for about 2 years and I want to say it has been a good run. Void Linux has been an absolutely great Linux distribution and has served me well for quite a while. However, every Linux distribution is not without it’s shortcomings. Although Void Linux is a great distribution, I still think that it had a few shortcomings that Alpine Linux fixes. What Alpine Does…
If you have seen any of the videos I made on FFmpeg you would know that I absolutely love it and I think that it is the absolute BEST video/multimedia program ever made. 1 FFmpeg has so many features and it implements almost all of them extremely well. So it comes to no surprise, after I initially made my FFmpeg videos I found out that FFmpeg can actually be used to create video streams and send…
Modern “brands” are a weird thing when you really think about them. Disney, Hewlett Packard, and Nike. What do all 3 of these have in common? They’re all considered brands. But what exactly is a brand? Before the industrial age, a brand was just a way to differentiate a product from a competitor’s product. In order to differentiate it one would often brand their name or…
For as long as I can remember, I have heard people say C/C++ when referring to a project written in C and or C++. A lot of programming/developer jobs also refer to C/C++ when they need a programmer who knows either C or C++. To most people who have never touched C or C++ this might not seem like a big deal. However, the problem is that when people say this term (C/C++) they make it seem like C and…
After a little less than a year of waiting, I finally obtained a VPS from Frantech/BuyVM . I was told that they are an exceptional VPS provider, and it turns out to be true . Their pricing is extremely fair as I can get double what Vultr offers for the same exact price (plus unlimited bandwidth). Their support was also pretty fast so I was able to setup everything relatively quickly. My only…
For those of you who don’t already know, I recently synced my entire YouTube channel to Odysee . So for those of you who want to avoid YouTube and Google entirely that is now an option. I will continue to upload videos to YouTube but they will be automaticly synced to Odysee shortly after I upload them (usually takes about an hour). I don’t plan on uploading exclusively onto Odysee,…
I have updated my GPG key. I will not be able to read any new encrypted emails that use my old GPG key. You can find my new GPG key here or import it directly by running: curl -fL 'https://brycevandegrift.xyz/bpv.gpg' | gpg --import
For the past year I have used Qutebrowser almost exclusively as my main web browser. I even made a video on how extensible and great it is here . However there have been a few glaring issues with it over other browsers like Firefox that I have noticed over the past year. Although Qutebrowser is a great web browser, I think that these issues are too important for me to ignore. Now before I start…
I know, I know, everyone is talking about support for the Rust programming language being added to the Linux kernel , and I’m no exception. This event is HUGE when it comes to Linux kernel development. Since the Linux kernel is predominantly written in C and has been that way for about the last 30 years, this comes as a very big surprise. I honestly would have expected C++ to be integrated…
Lisp (also known as LISP) is a family of programming languages that have had a significant impact on the world of computing. Lisp has had and still has a great influence on the evolution of programming languages and computing theory as a whole. It remains a very easy language to learn and not that hard to master. For those of you who don’t know what Lisp is, Lisp stands for “LISt…
Over the last couple of days I have been migrating my blog from using a markdown/Pandoc blog system to using Hugo for my entire website. For those of you who don’t know what Hugo is, Hugo is a static site generator that is written in Go . It takes plain markdown and converts it to plain HTML and CSS just like Pandoc. The biggest difference it has from Pandoc is that Hugo is written…
For the longest time I have used Infinity Free as the host for my website since it has free website hosting. However, I haven’t been able to successfully set up a SSL certificate without using Cloudflare. Cloudflare has not had a good reputation and, in my opinion, cannot be trusted at all . 1. Sourcehut Sourcehut provides static website hosting, git repository hosting, gemini hosting (sadly no…
My Thinkpad X220 You Need A Thinkpad X220 A Raspberry Pi Female to female jumper wires SOIC8 test clip Another computer Disassembly For disassembly you can watch my video here . But you’ll just have to remove all the screws with the keyboard icon and all the screws with the box(ish) icon. (Like I said, you can watch the video). Attaching the clip to the BIOS chip In order to actually read/write to…
I have decided to redesign most of my website. It’s mostly a facelift, but there are a couple under-the-hood changes done. I have also decided to officially add a link to my YouTube channel on my homepage, as well as add a link to my Sourcehut page and my rss feed . I plan to reorganize my website as time goes on, but for now a simple redesign will do. I also plan to at least convert my homepage…
Recently, I have decided to start up a YouTube channel. I mostly plan to upload informative videos, but things could always change. Right now, I am uploading videos about GNU/Linux and other technical topics related to technology, however I believe that I will expand in the future. In the future, I plan to upload all of my past and future videos onto Odysee/LBRY as I think it’s a superior platform…
Recently, I have been pretty busy with college classes and haven’t had much time to work on personal projects. In addition to classes I have also been busy with other personal aspects of life which I would not like to disclose currently. I will be active again once I finish the semester (hopefully). If anything comes up, feel free to email me here: https://brycevandegrift.xyz/contact/
For those of you who are not a big fan of Linux but want something that caters more to the Unix philosophy, a distribution of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) may be right for you. Unlike Linux, most BSD systems’ tools, kernels, and programs are built from the ground up for that specific BSD distribution. This also means that it can take a while for a feature or program that’s popular on Linux…
Recently, I have been working on a new blog system that takes Markdown and converts it into a very simple HTML page as well as an RSS feed. The blog system is written entirely in POSIX shell and is around 100 lines of code. If successful, it should generate a blog page, an RSS feed, as well as a rolling blog index page. The only downside is that it requires Pandoc which isn’t that small of a…