The official RSS Feed for https://btxx.org
Setup a Simple, Self-Hosted Web Server with OpenBSD 2026-07-18 This website is being served to you from my HP T630 thin client, running OpenBSD and httpd. Pretty cool, right? And best of all you can do the same! Update: OpenBSD is no longer used to serve this website. This site is now hosted back on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET , since my home network is too unstable to provide a consistent uptime. I also…
Installing SerenityOS on My Old ThinkPad T60 2026-06-28 I recently had the urge to play around with SerenityOS on real hardware. Since the project is slightly catered towards older machines, I figured my ThinkPad T60 was a perfect candidate for running on bare metal. The following is a loose guide for those interested in doing the same. Take note that I built SerenityOS on a separate device…
Serving a Website on a Raspberry Pi Zero Running Entirely in RAM 2026-05-08 My micro site, zero.btxx.org , is being served to the public internet from a Raspberry Pi Zero v1.3 running Alpine Linux. The best part? It’s diskless and running entirely from memory! My Raspberry Pi Zero silently running in my cold-storage room (with two extra Pis for moral support). Serving zero.btxx.org This is even…
Snail Mail Sign-Ups 2026-03-13 I recently came across Adrian’s post on HackerNews titled The dead Internet is not a theory anymore . It was a good read with similarly good discussions in the associated HN comments (rare, I know!). An interesting comment that stuck out to me was: I think next step will be an isolated version of invite-only internet where you have to be physically present with your…
DIY Home Network with OpenBSD, OpenWrt, and Pi-hole 2026-03-03 This post includes a full breakdown of my entire home network stack. My goal is to make this as accessible as possible for newcomers to jump right in and build out their own home networks. Important! I highly recommend reading through the entire tutorial before starting to implement anything yourself. That way you'll have a better…
Liberating the ASUS CX1100CN Chromebook with OpenBSD 2026-01-16 I’ve always enjoyed the idea of having a portable, lightweight, 11 inch laptop for my personal use for around the house and small trips. A device that I wouldn’t have to be concerned about just throwing in a backpack and forgetting about. Something inexpensive, that would allow me to shrug off breakage or theft. So, I snagged an ASUS…
Hyperlinks Should Have Context 2025-12-18 While poorly implemented links can cause minor annoyances for users, improper interactive links can often lead to a loss of users. That’s why, if you have interactive links on a website or application, it helps to include detailed context. This avoids incorrect actions being triggered or users second-guessing themselves and needing support. You can achieve…
Thoughts on Technological Purity 2025-12-12 “Everything should be running on OpenBSD. My desktop, router, web server, and even minor local services should all be built on top of the great Pufferfish BSD.” I told myself this “mantra” not too long ago, after diving head-first into the wonderful world of BSDs. The reasoning for this was to become well-versed in a single operating system, instead of…
Installing GNOME on OpenBSD 7.8 2025-11-07 This post is just a quick guide to get your OpenBSD desktop or laptop up-and-running with the GNOME desktop environment quickly. You can take things further once everything is setup, but I’ll be keeping things basic for now. Installing GNOME on OpenBSD 7.8 GNOME Packages Quirks and Tweaks 4K Screens GNOME Extensions The Future of GNOME After following all…
What Happens After I’m Gone? The Future of the Online Me 2025-09-12 Well, that’s a morbid headline… Let me start off by saying that I am doing well and in good health! This post is focused more on the concept of “future-proofing” my open source projects and stupid little mini-sites once I am no longer around to keep the wheels turning, so to speak. It’s something that most of us probably don’t…
My OpenBSD Home Network Setup 2025-08-25 I recently moved to an area with more internet provider options, all of which were not satellite-based. This change allowed me leave my current provider (Starlink) and also freed my network from being locked behind CGNAT. The jump from ~150Mbps to 1Gbps has been fantastic, but the real benefit in this switch has been the ability to overhaul my home network…
Setup Mullvad VPN on OpenBSD via WireGuard 2025-07-16 I’m a big fan of Mullvad’s approach on true privacy and very simple pricing. Most other VPNs market themselves for torrenting anonymously or using streaming services outside of your real location. These features are fine, but when a company is offering you 85% off a year subscription to their VPN - you can bet your bottom dollar they will sell…
Building a Simple Router with OpenBSD 2025-07-11 I’m hardly a “networking” or system admin expert. Even still, I’ve always been interested in the concept of building out my own home router with OpenBSD. It seemed so “hacky” and cool! The problem is that most of the tutorials I stumble across on the internet seem so daunting . I normally read through the guides (maybe even poke around the core man…
Starlink, OpenWrt, and Eeros… Oh My! 2025-06-29 In my previous post, Setting Up Pi-Hole with Eero on Starlink , I broke down how to implement - you guessed it - Starlink running through a PiHole connected to my mesh eero wifi nodes. That setup still works and runs well, but I wanted to take a stab at setting up my own router system. I got my hands on a D-Link DIR-878 A1 Router (say that ten times…
Creating a Basic Status Page on NearlyFreeSpeech 2025-05-12 Since I talked about hosting multiple websites through NearlyFreeSpeech in the past, I thought it would be nice to walkthrough setting up a barebones “status” page that runs automatically on your existing NFS server. This post isn’t going to be mind blowing, but it will give you a solid overview of some weekly stats, such as: basic system…
Setup an OpenBSD VM on macOS Using UTM 2025-03-12 The UTM app for macOS is an excellent piece of software for those wanting a streamlined GUI when working with virtual machines. Their existing Gallery of pre-built images is great, but it currently lacks any of the BSDs. Lucky for us, creating your own OpenBSD VM is very straightforward. OpenBSD 7.6 running inside UTM on macOS Download OpenBSD ISO…
Mac Apps That Bring Me Joy 2025-03-04 I wrote a post roughly 3 years ago about happily paying for MacOS apps . I’ve found a good amount has changed in my MacOS “usage” during that post and now 1 . So I thought I would revisit the general concept, only this time look at all applications I enjoy using (paid or otherwise). Note This article focuses on the MacOS specific programs that I use and does…
Hosting Multiple Websites Under One NearlyFreeSpeech Site 2025-02-14 It’s no secret that I’m a happy customer of NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (NFS). I’ve previously written about installing WordPress on their platform, and also published wikis on both setting up ikiwiki and cgit . Recently, I decided to move all personal and project websites back over to NFS after having a less than ideal VPS experience.…
Red Hat Plans to Add AI to Fedora and GNOME 2025-02-04 In Christian F.K. Schaller’s post Looking ahead at 2025 and Fedora Workstation and jobs on offer! he discusses how the Red Hat team is looking into using IBM’s Granite AI models to compliment the development of Fedora Linux and GNOME. One big item on our list for the year is looking at ways Fedora Workstation can make use of artificial…
Git Your Freedom Back: A Beginner’s Guide to SourceHut 2025-01-24 This article (or guide) is targeted towards users and contributors who are currently hosting their git repositories through GitHub. The goal of this post is to convince developers to move away from GitHub altogether. I will breakdown GitHub’s most popular core features and provide details on SourceHut’s alternative approach for each…
Deliver the Bare Minimum 2024-12-22 I’m a minimalist at heart, so keeping things as simple as possible tends to be my thing . I love tinkering with an idea or product feature while trying to reduce my reliance on dependencies or purposely constraining personally set limits (maybe this is bandwidth, resource usage, etc.). I almost prefer ugly “hacks” in favour of something slightly less performant,…
Installing OpenBSD on Linveo KVM VPS 2024-10-21 I recently came across an amazing deal for a VPS on Linveo . For just $15 a year they provide: AMD KVM 1GB 1024 MB RAM 1 CPU Core 25 GB NVMe SSD 2000 GB Bandwidth It’s a pretty great deal and I suggest you look more into it if you’re interested! But this post is more focused on setting up OpenBSD via the custom ISO option in the KVM dashboard. Linveo…
Vertical Tabs in Safari 2024-09-26 I use Firefox as my main browser (specifically the Nightly build) which has vertical tabs built-in. There are instances where I need to use Safari, such as debugging or testing iOS devices, and in those instances I prefer to have a similar experience to that of Firefox. Luckily, Apple has finally made it fairly straight forward to do so. Click the Sidebar icon in…
Build and Deploy Websites Automatically with Git 2024-09-20 I recently began the process of setting up my self-hosted 1 cgit server as my main code forge. Updating repos via cgit on NearlyFreeSpeech on its own has been simple enough, but it lacked the “wow-factor” of having some sort of automated build process. I looked into a bunch of different tools that I could add to my workflow and automate…
Burning and Playing PS2 Games without a Modded Console 2024-09-02 Important I do not support pirating or obtaining illegal copies of video games. This process should only be used to copy your existing PS2 games for backup, in case of accidental damage to the original disc. Requirements Note : This tutorial is tailored towards macOS and Linux users. Most things should work out-of-the-box on…
“This Key is Useless Now. Discard?” 2024-08-28 The title of this article probably triggers nostalgic memories for old school Resident Evil veterans like myself. My personal favourite in the series (not that anyone asked) was the original, 1998 version of Resident Evil 2 (RE2). I believe that game stands the test of time and is very close to a masterpiece. The recent remake lost a lot of the charm…
Perspective 2024-08-06 I recently read both Starting Hospice and No Salt posted on Jake’s blog and was quite moved. I don’t know Jake and have never met him - but his writing and shared experiences give a very real look into his mind and perspective. If you haven’t yet, I strongly recommend giving his site a read (or at the very least those two posts). It made me reflect on my own life, shift my…
Setting Up Pi-Hole with Eero on Starlink 2024-07-24 A couple years ago I wrote about setting up a standard pi-hole server with eero WiFi but since that time I have swapped out my “cell tower” internet for Starlink. The speed improvement has been incredible and there is no looking back at regular, rural internet. With the switch over minor adjustments needed to be made, so I took this as an…
Dual Booting OpenBSD and Alpine Linux on a X220 ThinkPad 2024-07-10 I’ve always found it useful to run both OpenBSD and some form of Linux variation on my personal machines. Most times, I would default to running one OS on bare metal, while the other would simply live in a VM. This works okay but I prefer my operating systems having a “hardware separator” - if that makes sense? So, I set off to…
Fixing Jekyll’s dart-sass Dependency on OpenBSD 2024-06-30 I recently wrote about working with multiple Ruby versions on OpenBSD which still works just fine, but I noticed a bug when trying to build a couple of my Jekyll projects locally: NotImplementedError: dart-sass for x86_64-openbsd7.5 For reference, these projects are being built with Ruby 3.3.0 against Jekyll 4.3.3. After doing some…
Building rbenv on OpenBSD 7.5 2024-06-02 I use Ruby (specifically with Jekyll) for a lot of my clubs/projects while using my personal laptop ( X220 ThinkPad ) which is runs OpenBSD. Since I recently upgraded to OpenBSD 7.5 I thought it could be helpful for others if I shared my process of building and using rbenv to install different Ruby versions. Before We Build First, be sure to install the…
Installing WordPress on NearlyFreeSpeech 2024-05-27 I recently went through the process of porting over my wife’s small business website (built off of WordPress + Woocommerce) from EasyWP to NearlyFreeSpeech. Although the process was fairly easy-going, I thought I would post my complete process here. That way, others who might wish to make the same switch can avoid running into any minor bumps…
OpenBSD is a Cozy Operating System 2024-04-11 OpenBSD 7.5 running dwm on my X220 With the recent release of OpenBSD 7.5, I decided to run through my personal OpenBSD “installer” for laptop/desktop devices. The project is built off of the dwm tiling window manager and only installs a few basic packages. The last time I updated it was with the release of 7.3, so it’s been due for an minor rework.…
Please Make Your Table Headings Sticky 2024-02-23 I often stumble upon large data sets or table layouts across the web. When these tables contain hundreds of rows of content, things become problematic once you start to scroll… Your browser does not support the video tag. This should be a header Look at that table header disappear! Now, if I scroll all the way down to item #300 (for example) will I…
Website Backups with Apple iCloud 2024-02-16 My main work machine, an M2 MacBook Air, meshes really well with my iPhone SE (they are in the same ecosystem after all - duh!). Since both of these devices are Apple products, it makes sense that I pay for the optional iCloud service for extra storage. 50GB to be exact. I only need to bare minimum which costs just $1.68 a month, making this storage…
New Domain and Code Forge 2024-01-29 As you can clearly see, my site’s domain has switched over to btxx.org . This post will go into details about the reason for this URL swap (spoilers: I’m a cheapskate) - but that isn’t all. I have moved my personal git repositories over to my own hosting. I will explain the reasoning for that switch as well. But enough introductions, let’s get into it! bt.ht is…
My Text Edtior is Not Open Source 2024-01-02 I’ve been using Sublime Text on and off for longer than I can remember. I think Sublime has been around since the start of my “real” career over 10 years ago, but I could be mistaken 1 . It certainly feels that long. And in that time I have never gotten upset with Sublime. I’ve never rage quit or ran into an issue of Sublime not being able to do the…
Switching Things Over to ikiwiki 2023-12-17 I’ve done it again. My personal website is no longer generated with barf but is instead built on top of ikiwiki. The old RSS feed ( btxx.org/atom.xml ) still exists but will no longer receive updates. The new feed can be found on the bottom of the homepage ( index.rss ) Why a Wiki? I love the simplicity of a minimal blog, which is why I always gravitated…
Bringing dwm Shortcuts to GNOME 2023-11-02 The dwm window manager is my standard “go-to” for most of my personal laptop environments. For desktops with larger, higher resolution monitors I tend to lean towards using GNOME. The GNOME DE is fairly solid for my own purposes. This article isn’t going to deep dive into GNOME itself, but instead highlight some minor configuration changes I make to mimic…
The X220 ThinkPad is the Best Laptop in the World 2023-09-26 The X220 ThinkPad is the greatest laptop ever made and you’re wrong if you think otherwise. No laptop hardware has since surpassed the nearly perfect build of the X220. New devices continue to get thinner and more fragile. Useful ports are constantly discarded for the sake of “design”. Functionality is no longer important to…
Installing Older Versions of MongoDB on Arch Linux 2023-09-11 I’ve recently been using Arch Linux for my main work environment on my ThinkPad X260. It’s been great. As someone who is constantly drawn to minimalist operating systems such as Alpine or OpenBSD, it’s nice to use something like Arch that boasts that same minimalist approach but with greater documentation/support. Another major reason…
Converting HEIF Images with macOS Automator 2023-07-21 Often times when you save or export photos from iOS to iCloud they often render themselves into heif or heic formats. Both macOS and iOS have no problem working with these formats, but a lot of software programs will not even recognize these filetypes. The obvious step would just be to convert them via an application or online service, right?…
Blogging for 7 Years 2023-06-24 My first public article was posted on June 28th 2016. That was seven years ago. In that time, quite a lot has changed in my life both personally and professionally. So, I figured it would be interesting to reflect on these years and document it for my own personal records. My hope is that this is something I could start doing every 5 or 10 years (if I can keep going…
Improving Laptop Battery Performance on OpenBSD 2023-06-13 It is no secret that OpenBSD has poor battery performance on laptops. Although not as impressive as something like Alpine Linux or FreeBSD, you can tweak OpenBSD just enough to squeeze more life out of your machine’s battery. Our New Best Friend: ampd I won’t go into great detail about ampd here - that’s what the incredible documentation…
Running VSCode in Chromium on OpenBSD 2023-06-05 Update (July 07, 2026) This unfortunately no longer works. VSCode and its many variations are not available on OpenBSD. This doesn’t cause issue with many OpenBSD users, but those making the jump from Linux might miss access to such a popular editor. Lucky for us, there is a hacky workaround to solve this problem. VSCode in the Browser I tried my…
My Robotic Mower Woes 2023-05-19 A Brief Background I’m no stranger to robotic lawnmowers. When my wife and I moved into our rural home just over five years ago, we picked up the Husqvarna 450X Automower since I was far too lazy to manually mow my property and the cost was equal to that of a standard riding mower. It was a no-brainer. The Husqvarna 450X (not mine but same model) Fast-forward five…
Working with git Patches in Apple Mail 2023-05-11 Before we begin You could likely automate this process in a more streamlined way, but for most use cases this workflow should be fine. I recently covered how to work with git email patches in Evolution on Linux , so I thought it would make sense to walk through a similar workflow for those using Apple Mail on MacOS. The idea is essentially the…
Stop Using Hamburger Menus (Sometimes) 2023-05-05 I recently tooted about my hatred of website hamburger menus which was met with a surprising amount of support from other users. It seems like most people don’t actually like hamburger menus . So why do we, as developers, keep using them in our products and designs? Is it our only option? Or is it because we have become conditioned to expect it?…
Converting My X201 ThinkPad into a Slabtop 2023-05-01 I recently wrote about physically disabling the WiFi toggle switch on my X201 which was a fun “hack” to an annoying issue I was running into. Since then, the laptop has been running flawlessly. The only other minor issue I had was the poor display quality. The screen works perfectly fine but the X201’s age prevents it from being the best…
Applying Email-Based Git Patches in Evolution on Linux 2023-04-25 Users who work with git patches through email most likely use a terminal-based program such as aerc or mutt . CLI email clients tend to have built-in support for easily applying patches directly to their local repos. But what about people who prefer to use graphical email apps? Lucky for us, it is actually fairly simple to replicate…