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The modern corporate state exhorts us and twists the idea of virtue. We’re surrounded by companies that speak of values and ideals. What is virtue? Etymologically, virtue comes from Latin, “virtus”, which is moral strength or excellence. It’s root, in turn, is “vir” or man. In the Roman sense, virtue describes the characteristics of manliness. I’m going to…
In my research on John Boyd, I came across a discussion of Strategy and Tactics that is worth revisiting as it applies to IT leadership. Tactics involve our plans around the known and controlled, strategy is our plans around the unknown and uncontrolled. Tactics adress things that we understand and control. For example, I know that my team has a certain number of vacation days left and that there…
I’m running GNS3 on Proxmox. GNS3 on ESXi is fairly straight forward, but there are some tweaks needed to support Proxmox. Disk Format Proxmox virtualization is Qemu-based and the GNS3 VM is distributed for VirtualBox, VMWare Workstation, VMWare ESXi, and Hyper-V. I’ve worked around that by running GNS3 in VMWare Workstation, but I’ve run into some issues with Workstation causing…
A shell is a tool used to execute commands in an operating systems. We most commonly think about shells as graphical (GUI) or command-line (text user interface or “TUI”), although I suppose you could imagine a spoken interface or mixed reality interface. In the context of “Linux”, it’s used mostly to refer to the specific TUI environment in use. Most Linux…
Proxmox Virtual Edition (PVE) PVE is a hypervisor that supports LXC containers and full virtual machines. It’s comparable to VMWare ESXi. The comparison fits across the board. There’s a Proxmox DataCenter Manager that’s similar to VMWare Cloud Director (VCD), and it supports a similar set of features such as high availability failover. The current version is 9 (as of 10/25), but…
Distro run-down This article summarizes my experiences and organizes my thoughts around Linux as of late 2025. There are a lot of Linux distributions and I haven’t tried to survey the field completely. In the past I’ve tried a wider sample, but for the most part I’m currently interested in either Debian-based or immutable ,modern distributions that support tiling. It’s also…
The problem Spectrum was in my neighborhood, extending their cable network finally. Bear in mind that Spectrum (Charter in those days) promised this “soon” when I first moved in. So, anyway, 24 years later they were installing conduit, nicked a power line, and shut down the neighborhood. As much as I’m griping about others, this story is really about personal stupidity. I setup a…
Ridding Yourself of Annoying Calendar Pop-ups on Linux Gnome will prompt for email accounts, and then tie in alerts from your calendar. These come in as pop-up windows. If you liked these in Outlook, you’ll be pleased with the Linux implementation. I didn’t like these reminders in Outlook. I feel that too many programs are competing for my attention and that pop-ups in general are a…
I built an Ubuntu server for work and then had to add a group of co-workers. I always need to lookup this up, so hopefully my notes will help you! Adding a user Adding a user to Linux is simple enough. The bash command is useradd . For a user bstewart, the commend is shown below. sudo useradd bstewart Set password One the user is created, they have to be assigned an initial password. This is done…
Recently I had to rebuild my desktop. Backups were my friend, and recreating my rig and loading files went without a hitch. My git directory restored, but I needed to reconnect them to Github. I decided to start with fresh pulls, so I renamed git to oldgit and pulled down my repos (including the one that’s used for this website). Once setup, Github is easy to use, but I always forget how to…
One of the guys on Jupiter Broadcasting spoke about a curl-able business card and I thought, “Gotta try it”. A little searching led me to an example - the card of Bryan Jenks . I used Bryan’s work as a template. Here’s what my finished version looks like. The basic concept is simple enough - put a slug of text on a web server and anyone can curl it. Following Bryan’s…
I recently had a lot of fun building a quick program to pull data from Jira Cloud and produce Word reports. I’ve shared jirareport at Github if you are curious. If you use Jira, this may be of interest (although most folks who use Jira are well beyond my meager abilities). Even if you don’t use Jira, this was an interesting experience. It was a fairly simple re-introduction to Python,…
Two months ago, I warned of issues with the 5.35 driver Since the initial post, I tried 5.35 after a rev and found that it worked well. Until today. nvidia-smi I used nvidia-smi this time and was able to see that - although dpkg showed the files installed, the driver wasn’t loaded. I found some instructions from Michael Murphy on [Lemmy.world] that helped to resolve this. sudo apt purge…
I’m going to wander into some concepts from my day job. Give me a little room and I’ll relate how this insight is relevant to everyone and what I’ve learned. By the time I start to make that turn, though, I’m guessing you’ll be well ahead of me. Technical Debt Technical debt is a concept that commonly discussed in IT. It’s generally understood to be the cost of…
Home Dashboards Home web dashboards serve as a “starting point” for web sessions. Especially as a certain portion of applications now reside online, a home dashboard is a customized menu of the things that you need presented in the way you want. Dashboards could be as simple as a collection of links, or include things like network and server statistics or embedded frames. Hosting your…
Exporting Markdown Most of my writing is in markdown in two applications - Visual Studio Code (where I write blog posts amoung other things) and Obsidian. Although initially reluctant, I’ve grown to appreciate the portability and easy reuse that markdown allows. The problem is that the rest of the world doesn’t always appreciate what is obvious to me. As an example, the folks at work…
Cool Extension The Activities Workspace Name allows you to change the “Activities” label in the top left of a Gnome desktop to reflect a name for each workspace. I find it really useful. My current setup is to use workspaces to seperate the different types of activities, so I have one for work, one for writing, one for development, and one for learning. I have a 4K display, run Pop!…
I found a fun addition to my command line - wttr.in. I live in Hickory, NC, and the following curl command will return the weather to the command line: curl 'https://wttr.in/Hickory%20NC'?0?A?u Weather report: Hickory NC _`/"".-. Thunderstorm in vicinity, light rain ,\_( ). 68 °F /(___(__) ↓ 2 mph ⚡‘‘⚡‘‘ 9 mi ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ 0.0 in Seeing a three day forcast is even easier. curl ‘…
In the course of building out a small program the other day, I realized that my version of Python was lagging behind. python -V Python 3.8.17 My setup I’m running Pop! OS 22.04, the latest version of Pop! for a while. Pop! currently uses Gnome with add-ins to customize the interface and deliver the tiled experience that Pop! is known for. Extensions have been a bugaboo for Gome for a long…
I wrote about Ahrefs a month ago. Ahrefs is a site inspector that provides feedback on errors on a website. I contine to use it and be pleased with it. Ahrefs after a month As this site has grown, I’ve encountered a number of issues. In the original post, I mentioned that I changed the folder structure at one time and even after a self-audit to clean things up still found references using…
My friends know that I am an avid reader and that I love Science Fiction. I’ve read that Science Fiction only became possible when people could see technology changing in their lifetime, and although we had slow changes for a long time it wasn’t until the last half of the 19th Century that we got Frankenstein . Even in Mary Shelley’s time, though, the pace of change was slow…
I’ve been writing in this space for about three years. I use Hugo and VSCode and write in markdown, so my workflow is less technical but there are still some aspects of maintaining a web page. My source files, for instance, were fairly easy to organize in the first year but over time have sprawled. Changes to my Hugo template have broken some older internal URLs as well. Even when I…
A little bit of fun today. There are many cases where we need to access different computers but can’t setup something like RDP. I had the idea to try this via video capture, so here’s my experience. Remote access via video capture I ordered the Extenuating Threads HDMI Capture Dongle from Amazon for $14. There are several options available - I went with Extenuating Threads because it…
My previous post dealt with building an easy way to convert Word files to Markdown and automatically incorporate them in Obsidian. That was accomplished by copying the DOCX file into a directory and having automation to perform the actions to get the file into the right place with the right format. I was pleased with the way that worked out and thought about other places where I’d like to…
I use Obsidian as a note taking journal, but I get a lot of documents in other formats that I’d like to include in that journal. One example is Word docs, such as my weekly reports. I’ve copied some PDFs into my Obsidian vault, but for some reason I hit on the idea of converting DOCX to Markdown. What Didn’t Work Just to save you time, I’ll mention a few ideas that I tried…
Hah! I don’t really believe that thing about being cooler, but have you ever done a project and just felt so pleased with yourself? I turned my Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite into a Linux tablet/laptop and I’m feeling pretty happy. The actual process isn’t that involved, so a little of my self-congratulation is probably undeserved, but the result is stinking cool! What is a Linux…
What is the best way to be truly anonymous online? Most of the time our concern is about being commercially tracked and having our browsing habits shared (I understand this doesn’t creep everyone out as much as it does me). My kids think I’m paranoid. Just for fun, take a look at Am I Unique and browse through all the different data points that are shared by your browser and can be…
I’ve covered a few items in recent months around my home network, including using Tailscale as a VPN overlay and setting up a home DNS server. This entry is an update on living with those elements. As a point of comparison, I’ve used Zerotier in the recent past and really liked it. With Zerotier, I had a dedicated Ubuntu server VM to route the local network onto the Zerotier VPN. That…
Incorporating blog articles in Obsidian Most of my writing occurs in two places, but I’d like to consolidate it into my “second brain”. My blog articles are written in Visual Studio Code, in markdown so that they can be compiled via hugo . I’ve discussed in this blog that Obsidian - also in Markdown - is setup as my “second brain”. My blog posts represent an…
In the course of another project, I recently worked out how to send email through Gmail from the Linux shell. This is both a really cool and powerful tool as well as something I could see incorporating into a lot of future work. Since it had such utility, I wanted to document the process for myself and share that with you. Some Linux operations, such as cron, will send output to the local mail…
ChatGPT is all the rage these days. It can carry on a chat conversation and compose text. Folks are using it to help write business letters, to help write documents, and to explore the state of modern Artificial Intelligence. Because ChatGPT has ingested a lot of background data, it’s able to write coherently on a number of topics and sometimes can make insightful inferences. Contrarily,…
Not sure where to classify this discovery - Carbonyl is a shell-based brower that is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Carbonyl is built on a Chromium engine and does not support plugins at this point or tie into an existing Chrome installation. Carbonyl is fast and it produces a low-res but usable web page. It is surprisingly responsive - there’s a demo of someone playing Doom using it…
If you have a private name server at home, use “home.arpa” I’ve used IPs for most of my home networking for a while. At one point (years ago) I ran a Windows DNS server, but I’ve banished Windows and Linux DNS is extra work. Plus, systemd makes DNS on Linux painful. A couple of things have changed recently. First, I’ve played with some server applications such as…
Goodhard’t law is a good example of why we say management is an art. Many of you won’t be familiar with this, but you should. The law says . . . When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Goodhardt’s law speaks to the tendency of people to optimize around a measurement. A “measure” is anything that you track, such as what percentage of folks…
I’ve created a seperate site - Stewart.tc - to house my book reviews, discoveries, and thoughts on non-Internet subjects. I titled this “IMHO” or “in my humble opinion”, but I’ve always tried to avoid opinions in this space on non-technical topics. Even the “non-technical” tag is about Internet topics for presentation to non-techies. I started…
Thirty five years ago (!) I took my Amiga 1000 to college. There used to be a copy of WordPerfect for everything and that was what I did a lot of my term papers on. I would print postscript files to a 3.5" disk, then take them to the library and print using copy termpaper.ps > lpt1: to the LaserWriter. But then, like now, computers were used for more than just work. There were a lot of cool Amiga…
I’ve heard good things about Nextcloud for a long time and finally decided to take the plunge. I have a home file server that is accessed via sshfs and nfs, but it’s a little problematic to get to from Windows or mobile. Nextcloud extends the file sharing through a web and dav interface to make it accessible from anywhere. Nextcloud offers a lot of functionality, but my initial focus…
Pop! OS has spoiled me. I used to try to slide windows left and right across multiple monitors to get them to all fit. My current workflow on Pop! is to enable tiling on my 4K display and then use multiple desktops if I need to divide my work areas. I’ve recently been using Windows more and set out to recreate that workflow. I won’t claim an exhaustive search, but here is the way…
I’ve recently written about using Obsidian - an intro , a discussion of tasks and add-ins, and a discussion of dataview . The number of add-ins and the ideas that are being implemented using Obsidian has exploded, and hopefully I’ve provided enough to get you started and help you discover how it could work for you. Justin Pot at PC Magazine published a review in November. It’s a…
If you support IT infrastructure, the goal is to minimize issues (particularly issues with big impacts). Some issues can be anticipated and pre-mitigated. Considerable success can be achieved but perfect is not for this life. As a leader, I want to ensure that we learn and improve from every issue. One way to do that is through a post-mortem process. I had a mish-mash of approaches that I used…
I grab onto quotes. Some I hold onto long enough to consider and they pop up in conversation at odd times. Others seem to bubble up consistently. To me, these favorite quotes are the compass that I use to retain my sense of direction in difficult times and circumstances. Folks who have worked with me over the years will have heard versions of these sayings (and probably some that I am forgetting…
OS Hopping update I’ve confessed in this blog to being a distro hopper. I love to see what is possible and to explore alternatives! I haven’t provided an update on where that journey has taken me, so let’s start there. I have a desktop, where the majority of work is done, and a laptop for traveling and returning emails from the couch. The desktop is running Pop! OS and I’ve…
This article is the third I’ve written on Obsidian. Part 1 describes the basics and Part 2 covers tasks, this article will describe using Dataview. Core Obsidian is “just” a markdown editor with some Wiki functionality and a pretty good understanding of tasks. The magic comes through add-ons. The process of adding plugins is described in the second article where I discussed…
Hashicorp makes some cool tools for playing in the cloud or a virtualized environment, especially if you want to build out an Infrastructure as Code approach and make infrastructure updates a CI process. Packer is a tool that let’s you define a server - OS, cores, storage, packages, and all - in a script that can be built on demand. You can even define your environment, like LAMP, in the…
I’m interested in TailScale. I’ve been hearing good things about it from my friend, Jared, and TailScale has a fair set of proponents on my favorite podcasts. A couple years ago, I setup ZeroTier and built a dedicated Linux device to attach to the ZeroTier network and route into my local LAN. I wrote a well-received set of articles about that experience ( Zerotier Basic Configuration…
Obsidian has been a great way to organize my work and my personal activities. This is the third article I’ve written in this series. Part 1 was an introduction and Part 2 focused on tasks and used that as an introduction to plugins and tags. This entry will focus on linking and embedding. At this point we’re focusing on using Obsidian to take notes as we go. After this, the series will…
In Part 1 , I introduced you to Obsidian. Obsidian is a markdown-based note taking application that is supported on most desktop and phone operating systems. That article describes the basic interface and usage of Obsidian. If you are not familiar with Obsidian, it’s a good place to start. Part 2 will focus more on tasks within notes. We’ll use tasks to also introduce plugins and tags.…
I’ve kept notes using a lot of different tools over the years. I’ve used Outlook, Simple Note, Visual Studio Code, and even just Notepad. At the start of the pandemic, I switched back to writing on paper. I like paper because the mechanical act of writing helps keep me present in a meeting, it engages my brain, and it’s not distracting to the other folks in the meeting. On the…
Flash was a technology to extend the functionality of websites past what was possible with HTML at the time. It allowed for highly interactive experiences and was used for streaming, video games, and for “application like” experiences inside the browser. Flash was implemented on the client-side via a browser “plug-in” and was notorious for security issues. In my experience,…
An upcoming article features some basic math, but rendering it in markdown is unaesthetic. What you get is E=mc^2 when what you want is $ E=mc^2$. My search led me to KaTeX which is a JavaScript library that let’s you put $\LaTeX$ code into an HTML document. LaTeX was created to typeset scientific papers, so it is built for displaying things like matrices and integrals. I don’t plan to…