Latest from Chris Portela's Digital Home on Chris Portela
I was reading a blog post about using remote ssh from Cursor/VS Code and it mentioned, sort of offhandedly, to double-check you were not using the wrong SSH config in Cursor or VS Code. Honest first thought: you can point Remote SSH at a specific ssh-config file? Turns out yes — and that is a bigger deal than it sounds (to me…). One file, too many masters Link to heading I don’t know…
If you’re considering getting a domain for yourself with your name, I have some things you may want to consider first. Having a domain you control on the internet is a huge and awesome thing. It’s what the internet is designed for. Thanks to technical challenges and on-going costs it makes sense why most don’t have one, but it’s still a really cool thing to have. That said,…
Installing macOS 26 (developer.apple.com) on UTM requires a special package for it to work. You’ll need to install the Device Support (developer.apple.com) package which avoids needing to install the beta version of XCode simply to run the VM. But if you do need/want the beta version of XCode that also will fix trying to run macOS 26 on a VM.
I have been managing my dotfiles using Nix with Home Manager (github.com) for quite a long time. While I have been using it to make my life much easier I know that getting started with it can be quite an uphill battle because of how much you need to get right and the documentation for Nix, Home Manager, and etc. are constantly changing as Nix and the ecosystem are continually improved.
About a year ago I moved into a new apartment complex with managed smart door locks. As cool as it was, the problems with the system were obvious from the start. Not to mention that the system, made by Chirp (owned by RealPage), was the subject of a big security controversy and government advisory that was later retracted. The Chirp app does provide a convenient experience for its users, but it…
A few years ago there was a crowd funding campaign on CrowdSupply 1 for an interesting project called DiceKeys. The concept was that with 25 specially labeled/numbered die you could create an offline secret value with 192-bits of entropy. Using this entropy and a special app you could scan a dice roll into your phone or computer and use it to generate other secrets and passwords based on a very…
I like to keep this website extremely simple and not just from a design perspective, but from a maintenance perspective too. I don’t want to spend all my time trying to maintain this website and that’s why I ended up picking Hugo so long ago and I’ve stuck to it (as well as for my other websites like 0xa.io (www.0xa.io) ). However, when you’re not actively maintaining…
I got an error when I was trying to pull from a bare repo on an external hard drive: error: dst ref refs/heads/synced/git-annex receives from more than one src It was on my NAS and I also got some Write errors which made me think it was some issue with NTFS or maybe the permissions on my NAS. Maybe what my git-annex environment was setup as. But it turns out that, while yes I should have been…
I’ve published my updated dotfiles on github. (github.com) For a long time I kept this repo private because it had some commits that had what thought might be sensitive information. As I’ve upgraded my dotfiles to use Nix that became less and less of an issue, but the problem remained of the work-specific changes I made to make my life easier at Discord.
Recently I rented a new dedicated server in a Miami Data Center to have a bunch of remote compute at my disposal to use from things like my phone and Macbook Air 1 . I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with it, but I think at least running this website or running a Mastodon instance would be options. And because I love NixOS that is what I was planning to run on it directly…
In the past few years I’ve had several chances to setup CI/CD workflows for various projects for my employer and client’s projects. Each time I’ve iterated on my ideas and have developed in my mind what would be the ideal for those projects. I take for granted the following: The project is version controlled using git The Git repo is hosted on something like Github and something…
Today I spent some time setting up NixOS on Windows 11 with Hyper-V and it turned out pretty good. As I’ve worked over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that you really want a fairly Locked Down machine to work on connected to a powerful one. I recently built a rather beefy computer to replace my 6 year old Desktop and because it’s running an Intel 12900k I figured the best…
Apple’s march of releasing very efficient and fast computers using their new M1[ Pro/Max] processors has long been leading me dream about how nice it would be to distribute how I do my work to more computers. Ever since the iPad Pro I’ve been interested in making my setup work primarily remotely. As I document in my garden: The iPad can be setup for doing development and sys-admin work…
I find myself being the person friends and family often come to for information. Especially if they’re learning to code or trying to understand something technical. Most times when these questions come up I just search the first thing I think of and reply with that, but I also keep a bunch of curated content in my Personal Knowledge Gardens as well. Little things I’ve found online,…
In the past few days… a lot has happened. Those events have encouraged a large number of people to download Signal (signal.org) . Primarily from a combination of Apple forcing apps to provide simple descriptions of their Privacy Policy and an ultimatum from Facebook to allow linking data in WhatsApp. Additionally, there are concerns 1 about changes in the white paper explaining the…
I don’t update this website enough, but there is always something I’d like to add similar to how I dump things into my notebook in Notion. I’ve done this a few times before, but I’m adding a Digital Garden to my website again. I was inspired to do it again thanks to this article (www.technologyreview.com) in MIT Technology Review about others with Digital Gardens.
Look in to `uv` PyEnv is still very useful, but these days switching your project over to uv is preferable simply for the seamless management of specific python versions and improved performance over pip . Check it out (docs.astral.sh) With the deprecation of Python 2 most of us using Python 3 are upgrading and moving to ensure we continue to get support.
There are a couple languages out there at excite me a lot to think about. When I read about swift I light up with ideas about all the beautiful apps I will write with just emojis (I think that’d be fun). When I read about Rust I imagine all the low level but still very safe code I’ll be able to write. Heck, maybe I’ll be the guy who figures out how to make games with it! Speaking…