Recent content on Loren's blog
I recently had the opportunity to purchase some software in an IT role. Everything went well until I needed a modification to my billing. Easy enough, according to the software’s website. Just email us and we’ll apply the modification. So I shot off an email asking to apply a modification to my billing. 
 I received a friendly response from a salesman: “How are you planning…
I recently came into possession of an old Dell Precision T3610 workstation and promptly installed Proxmox to
add it to my Proxmox cluster. After performing some ludicrously silly RAM and storage upgrades (how about 96
GB of DDR3, plus a 13-disk array of 500 GB SSDs?), I decided I wanted to max out the CPU as well. 
 The Precision T3610 shipped with an Intel Xeon E5-1650 v2…
My PC is built in a fishtank-style case, namely the Lian Li O11 Vision . 
 
 The Lian Li O11 Vision. What a nice case! 
 
 

 Despite being built as a collab with the PC Masterrace subreddit (aka PCMR), this case and others with the same fishtank style
are widely derided by many Redditors. While glass panels give you a great view of your internal components and RGB…
I recently switched my primary email to be hosted under my own domain, instead of using Outlook.com mail. It turns out there both advantages and disadvantages to doing so. I’ll try to fairly address both sides, but (spoiler alert) I think that the pros heavily outweigh the cons. 
 Before we begin, I’d like to note that I personally am using Purelymail ’s hosting, as it is…

 All Google Play apps require a privacy policy. Here’s mine. 
 Privacy policy 
 This application does not collect, store, or transmit any personal or user data.
Your privacy is fully respected, and you can use this app with confidence that
your information remains entirely private. 

While I do not own a VR headset, as a technophile, I am very intrigued by the technology and like to follow the developments that happen in the VR space. As a result, I’ve become aware of the screen door effect: when you look closely at content rendered on a VR headset, you can see the gaps between pixels. Given that pixels are laid out in a grid, this ends up giving the feeling of looking…
A while back I wrote about the challenges that are preventing mass Linux adoption. I’ve been mulling on this and related topics for a while, and yet I haven’t really progressed far beyond my closing thoughts from then: 
 
 However, I think there’s another way we could push Linux faster. If some enterprising person launches a Linux computer startup that focuses heavily on…
As a space nerd, I love learning about the craziest rocket concepts that have come up over the years (and there certainly have been quite a lot ). One category of concept intrigues me in particular: single-stage-to-orbit , or SSTO. This type of spacecraft can reach orbit without the need for detachable boosters or other staged hardware. This is quite easy to achieve on a body like the Moon, given…
Today marks the public introduction of the Matrix Codebrowser . It’s an instance of codebrowser that is hosting the sources for mtxclient , libQuotient , and olm (with more projects to come in the future). 
 Testimonials 
 
 But it’s almost surreal to see my own code in a page that I usually see when I need to understand Qt’s inner workings. 
 
 kitsune ,…
Ever since the dawn of time (er, Linux), enthusiastic users have predicted the advent of the year of Linux on the desktop. Hardly a year has gone by without somebody proclaiming it to be such a year. And yet Linux only recently crossed 4% of desktop market share worldwide. What gives? 
 On the surface, it’s easy to point to different reasons. Maybe it’s the overwhelming sea of…
This is the first post in what will hopefully be a long series where I take a look at different C++ libraries and utilities that are uniquely awesome. Today, we’re looking at FINAL CUT , a library for implementing a GUI in the terminal. It promises an API that is very similar to Qt’s API and plenty of functionality, and it doesn’t disappoint. 
 Getting started 
 I was…

 TL;DR: I’ve packaged Ollama for openSUSE! As of February 27, 2024, it’s available for Tumbleweed (Leap will hopefully pick it up at some point). Just run sudo zypper ref && sudo zypper in ollama to get it! Please note that it will not use your GPU for now; if you need GPU support, keep installing Ollama from https://ollama.com instead. Now for the main post… 
 As…
Open-source maintainers go through a lot. They have to deal with users who feel entitled to having their bugs fixed before the other bugs, contributers who submit pull requests of
subpar quality, and loads and loads of duplicate issues. Given all this, it’s understandable that maintainers sometimes feel overwhelmed or lash out at those they feel are being
unreasonable (for example,…
I’ve built this blog using Hugo , which I love for its sheer simplicity. However, I noticed that the autogenerated RSS feed 
wasn’t showing any author information. It turns out that I copy-pasted an outdated hugo.toml template that used an older method of specifying author information. This led to
the following changes in my hugo.toml : 
 [ params ]
 # before 
…
On February 18, Lapce hit number one on Hacker News . I was immediately intrigued to see
a new cross-platform IDE show up that was not built on Electron. In fact, I was intrigued enough to download Lapce and take it for a spin (in fact, I’m writing
this post in Lapce). 
 My review will be influenced heavily by the fact that I nearly exclusively work with C++. I sometimes use QML…
There, I said it. 
 Now that I’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk a bit about why we should actually ban SMS 2FA. 
 
 A quick note: I’ve rewritten this post to present a more balanced view of the topic. You can find the old version on the Internet Archive. 
 The problems 
 SMS 2FA is something of a paradox in and of itself. Two-factor authentication is…

 tldr: if you want to create an archive of all your Steam games, check out download-steam-games on my GitHub. It has minimal documentation, but you should be able to get it running without too much trouble. 
 I recently decided it would be cool to download some beta versions of KSP2 so I can revisit them in a year or so and laugh about how many terrible bugs there were in the original…
Kerbal Space Program 2 had its first
major update, called For Science!, released a week ago (as of my writing this). As a KSP nerd, I
downloaded it and ran it that day. Since then, I’ve done some messing around with it, and I thought
I’d write down my impressions. 
 The good 
 There’s so much to love about the For Science! update. As the first Early Access…
I’ve been diving into the world of selfhosting recently, but there’s a catch: it’s not just me. I’m doing it with some friends. This, of course, is fun, but I think the term “selfhosting” is a bit of a misnomer here; furthermore, I think that there is a powerful new type of selfhosting here that could change the way people selfhost. 
 Grouphosting 
…
I’m setting up this blog to try to start writing down the occasional thing that might
be useful to others.