Recent content in Posts on nikdoof.com
For the past few weeks i’ve been frustrated by a minor issue I couldn’t track down. If I attempted to purchase an app on the Apple App Store, or buy anything via Apple Pay in Safari, I ended up with a box to pay that had no buttons to actually continue. At first I thought it was another glorious Apple failure in macOS, but instead its me who is causing the issue.
I’ve started using NixOS heavily in my homelab in the last few months, inspired by some limited experience a year ago and my love of Terraform I decided to take the plunge with one system in the lab, eventually it finished with the decommissioning of my VMware ESXi host and my Kubernetes cluster. So now I run a NixOS hypervisor hosting several virtual machines via microvm.nix . The microvms…
Tiling window managers have interested me for some time, but being a avid macOS user i’ve not had much oppertunity to use them, my last attempt was using GlazeVM on a Windows system at my previous job. For some reason I spent most of my time fighting with it rather than using it, and I eventually gave up. My new job provided me with a MacBook Pro, which i’m far more comfortable with,…
Threads is a protcol under the Matter ecosystem, and at its core it is a dressed up version of Zigbee made to handle IPv6 over the air rather than the odd device protocol. With that change controllers become border routers that can route traffic between the Thread network and the rest of your IP network, making the whole system quite accessible and easy to work with, but can present some…
Me, very happy to be standing in front of some Luxo Jr. artwork. Retro “Sprint” 45 is over, yes its nerdy, but after looking over my unpublished 2024 retrospective it popped into my head. While I did write one for 2024 it never made it to a published state due to what was happening in the start of 2025.
This was our first meetup after UK Games Expo in June, and it seems that Oink Games has a little bit of a stranglehold on the group. Mark brought Mr. Face and A Fake Artist Goes to New York with him, but unfortunately they failed to hit the table this time. The first game out of the shelf and onto the table was Scout . Scout Scout is a simple ladder climbing game where you’re trying to build…
vCluster is a great tool for anyone managing larger Kubernetes clusters which may contain multiple users, environments, a need for larger isolation between workloads. For me vCluster works brilliantly as a method of testing new applications in a disposable cluster where I can run some of the larger, more integrated operators and tooling without much fear of interfering with my existing Kubernetes…
They say that life always throws the curve-balls at the most inopportune moments, and needless to say 2024 has been the very definition of that. The year started bad , improved, then hit another roadblock in September that saw me putting my life on hold again. Thankfully, i’ve come out of the other side without any major issues. As it turns out that not processing my health scare from early…
I’m currently in the process of improving the build process for some VMware templates, and as part of that, I have to make sure that a sizeable list of security requirements gets ticked off. One of the issues that had been previously identified is that our Ubuntu 22.04 templates all had the same machine-id file. This seems to be related to the template keeping the value configured due to how…
I don’t like sharing a lot of details of my personal life, but from time to time I feel the need to ‘shout out into the ether’, not to be heard, but almost as a way of personally processing what i’m experiencing. It almost feels like a small extension of Getting Things Done to get it off my mind, even if absolutely nobody read it. I’ve gone past the 6 month mark since…
During the first weekend in June, I made my yearly pilgrimage to the UK Games Expo at the Birmingham NEC. UKGE is the UK’s biggest boardgame convention which has been running since 2007, year to year it has grown in size to the point now that it uses up four halls of the NEC. For me, the expo is a chance to check out some new games, buy ones that generally I can’t get my hands on, and…
We’re an Apple household, phones, watches, laptops, iPads, TVs, everything. My in-laws are not. They’ve been suffering with a terrible Amazon Fire Stick for a while, Amazon is obsessed with chewing more and more of the screen real estate with their view on how people want to browse TV shows, almost to the point of being outright hostile. With their ever-increasing age, their small 32"…
I really love my Doxie scanner, a little portable device that can run off AA batteries and also write out straight JPEG files to an SD card without much hassle. Its amazing for a truly portable scanner but if you want to scan a page duplex, or even more than three pages, it becomes a bit of a chore to deal with. After the scanning is done you’ve then got to handle those files into a usable…
Since my heart attack I’ve been scheduled for a confirmation MRI scan of my heart. I didn’t really know much about it, but I’ve been sitting on the waiting list since early January, or so I thought. A week or so ago I had my appointment set and it was for a ‘ cardiac MRI stress test ’, which after spending a few minutes reading online I found out that it can’t…
It is going to be a short one this week. I’ve spent most of my time working on restoring a few ’90s to ’00s Apple devices, so you may notice a theme. The PiSCSI project; uses a Raspberry Pi and some control logic to enable the Pi to operate as a set of SCSI devices, including HDDs, CD drives, and even as an SCSI to Ethernet adapter. Appearance Manager was a theming manager…
Oh boy, it’s been a while since I promised this type of post. This will cover from the end of last year to date. Playdither is a web tool for applying black and white dither to images, mostly designed for people working with the Playdate but it’s an interesting tool for anyone to play with (hence my new avatar on the front page). About Ideas Now , is an aggregation site for…
The Netatalk logo. Working on retro Apple Macs sometimes presents its own challenges in a modern context, most systems make use of either outdated or dying media which may be unreliable or difficult to locate. In my case, I’ve recently acquired a Power Mac G4 Sawtooth which while it has USB the interface is slow and wrangling files between computers using USB sticks isn’t the quickest…
On the 30th of December, I sat on the sofa finishing a few bits of coding on the Hackspace API for Leigh Hackspace . I moved to put myself in a better position because I felt uncomfortable and felt an ache in my arm, much like banging your funny bone. Within a few seconds, it felt like my entire back had locked up and I couldn’t do anything to get in a good position again. After grumpily…
In October 2003, I made my first leap into using an Apple device. For quite some time I’d been trying to find a reasonable and portable machine for daily use, and I had slowly gotten frustrated with the current offerings by Dell, HP, and other major laptop manufacturers. In the hunt for something new, I picked a Powerbook G4 12". This machine was my daily workhorse for several years and at…
Sometimes I come across interesting content, but usually it’s read, and then forgotten within a few hours. In the past week, I’ve decided to start making a note of anything particularly interesting so I can post it on my site. So, here we go… On the ‘Back To Work’ podcast, Episode 617 . Merlin discusses the upcoming tvOS 17 and how they’ve introduced Continuty…
This is a bit of a vent, I may be wrong, I may be a little caught up in the moment, but a simple task should not be this difficult . I’m currently trying to setup a Kiosk-mode Raspberry Pi for Leigh Hackspace to act as a ‘Hackspace Status’ screen, showing some stats and a rotating list of artwork to show upcoming events. I decided to just try and build something myself, but while…
The Trust WB-1200P, a webcam from the early days of USB devices. Linux is known for its good hardware support of even ancient pieces of kit. From time to time the kernel devs deprecate drivers and architectures that are no longer supported, but for the most part, you can pick up an old piece of hardware and get it running on a major release or two from the current mainline.
The USW Mini is a tiny, 5 port, PoE or USB-C powered switch from Ubiquiti. As part of my homelab reorganization, I picked two up to serve as small spur switches for the downstairs media hub and my office desk. The problem is that, unlike the rest of Ubiquiti’s switching range, these devices are relatively dumb and can be a bit of a pain to get adopted into the Unifi console if you have…
Losing your cached media folder on Mastodon can be a pain. For days your instance will show broken images and issues to your end users. I operate a small instance at incognitus.net for a small community of friends, and recently I needed to move the storage from one NAS to another, to save the pain of the transfer speed I decided on nuking the cache and sorting it out after the fact. As it turns…
No, really, that’s all of it. Ash Huang and Ryan Putnam have started an experiment to try and get the ball rolling, so to speak. The aim is to create three blog posts during January to promote blogging, RSS, and the ‘old way’ of doing things before social media and their ilk. The site at Bring Back Blogging holds a list of everyone involved, the barrier for entry is small, and if…
Mastodon has a storage problem. The current version (which is 4.0.2 at time of writing) currently stores remote users’ avatars and header images in the cache, but no function exists to clean down these cached images. For the last month, the instance I manage has ballooned to 73GB of these files. The ‘fix’ was to manually remove the files and then run a ‘remove…
Over the bank holiday weekend I had the sad job of closing my workshop. My workshop started as a small hobby hole, I had been gifted a wood turning course in 2016 by my wife, I was unsure if its something i’d be interested in but I did have the drive to try something different from IT. In conversation I had brought up the idea of doing blacksmithing one day, and my wife did look for…
Recently i’ve spotted quite an up-tick in discussions about blogging and content generation in this quickly evolving federated and user hosted future. Blogs are “cool” again, tried and tested RSS is the tool to subscribe with, and OPML is back as the method to share your feeds. For me, RSS never really went anywhere. People like to call it dead after Google Reader shut down, if…
The Promise In my previous post I discussed switching over to Obsidian for my “PKM” with a plan to create a set of tooling around migrating from LogSeq. If anyone had checked out the promised repository then you would of seen that it is empty and has been untouched since the original post. The issue I had is that I had no easy way to actually migrate my data over, every method was…
dimension.sh is nearly 2 years old. I initially started dimension as I wanted to rekindle a love of an old ‘pubnix’ I used to be a member of back when I was in college, it ended up being a small community where I met a few good friends to which i’m still in contact with twenty years later. I happened to come across the the tilde community one day and was reminded of this fun part…
I’ve operated a relatively simple Home Assistant installation for the past 3 or so years, for the longest time it comprised of a few Hue bulbs, a hub, and a very slow Optiplex FX160 running Home Assistant and a few other services. Much like any small pet project the scope creeped into its current form: 20 Hue devices 9 IKEA Tradfri devices. 3 Generic Zigbee sensors. 6 ESPHome Smart Plugs. 1…
I’ve hosted my Home Assistant install on Kubernetes for quite a while, using a basic network setup of Kube Router, MetalLB, and Traefik. As part of a upgrade cycle I decided to build out a new cluster making use of a CSI plugin for iSCSI provisioning on FreeNAS, and also HAProxy hosted on a pfSense instance. I copied my configs over to the new cluster, and Home Assistant got in a bit of a…
For some time i’ve been using LogSeq as my primary note taking tool, essentially an open source version of Roam Research it quick became a prime choice due to its offline first design. Over the past year it has been my source of reference and a method to store fleeting knowledge in a way I can easily access. Like all good software tools, over time everything develops competitors. Roam gave…
I need to re-live my youth through the purchase of expensive old technology. When I was younger, much, much younger, my prized possession was a Sega Game Gear . At the time it was the pinnacle of gaming technology; a colour backlit screen, a ‘powerful’ processor equal to the Master System . The device went along everywhere with me and I chewed through batteries like there was no…
I’m a semi-active participant in the #gemini IRC channel on Tilde.chat, and today I noticed that ew0k had announced Antenna . The idea of Antenna is to avoid polling of Atom feeds, where back-offs and downtimes can be detrimental to services trying to combine feeds from several sites. Instead, sites push their updates to the service, much like ping-backs of the old blogging days. Updates to…
Setting up Kiln for this site has been quite the adventure, i’ve been using Hugo for a few years and have grown accustomed to the way of working, ideally I would of continued using it for this site but getting Hugo to support Gemini markup is difficult at best. Kiln is in that sweet-spot of pure functionality and simplicity, keeping the key tools from other static site generators like…
For some time, I’ve been using a Zig-a-zig-ah and Zigbee2MQTT on a spare Raspberry Pi 2 . It was far from the most stable platform as the zzh sucked power and caused voltage issues with the Pi, but it worked for what I needed. After a few months, I was frustrated at the frequent restarts the system required. The voltage drops should cause just enough of an issue for Z2M to stop communicating…
TASK [www : Enable httpd_read_user_content] ************************************ 04:03:45 459 fatal: [s1.dimension.sh]: FAILED! => {'changed': false, 'msg': 'Failed to manage policy for boolean httpd_read_user_content: [Errno 0] Error'} The result of a standard weekly AWX run on a system was an error. Failed to manage policy for boolean ...: [Errno 0] Error , not exactly the most helpful error to…
When I switched back to an M1 MacBook Air , I picked a CalDigit TS3+ as my desk dock. The M1 suffers from a distinct lack of ‘standard’ ports, which is excellent for the form factor, but it isn’t beneficial for desk usage where you need a collection of accessories plugged in. Thankfully, the CalDigit TS3+ plugs that hole nicely by providing a wide selection of ports and…
Sometime around 2015 I purchased an MX Master mouse, and I had a gift certificate for PC World (an electronics shop in the UK) which reduced the price to about £40. At the time, it felt like a frivolous purchase, but I had to buy a new mouse as my ageing Microsoft Explorer mouse had finally died after around ten years of service. “Buy it for Life” is the idea that you purchase…
This morning I decided to look at my sites, and I counted seven domains where I create some form of written output. Only one, this site, has a clear-cut definition of what content to place on there. The remaining list of six domains have been sites created on a whim or created to fill a specific need, and splitting my time between them has reduced the amount of quality work I can create on others.…
I have an idea of how I want to work. Sometimes when I come across an insightful article or book I like to keep note of useful information, interesting concepts, or just quotes. Currently, I’m using a collection of different tools that enable this; Instapaper for online media, Kindle highlights for my books, and LogSeq to capture any other media notes. The issue is that all these systems are…
Well, it’s not strictly one month later, more a month and a bit. Pandemic time can stretch out normal time periods to be a tad longer than what you expect. On the 10th December 2020 I ordered one of the new MacBook Air M1 , and since the 16th it has been my daily driver laptop. Previously I had been using a Surface Pro 6 but surprisingly the performance started to drop off a cliff just a few…
Admitting something isn’t working for you is the first step, next is deciding on what to do next. Less than a month ago I posted how [Notion] was now the key part of my “Second Brain” and at that point, I’d spent three weeks building my “LifeOS”, as its frequently called, in the application and integrating with my Getting Things Done workflow. In comes LogSeq (…
I migrated over to Notion ( archive.org ) within a few hours of opening an account, my discovery of it coincided with my attempt to re-implement my Getting Things Done workflow with P.A.R.A. ( archive.org ) style document storage. I had previously been a very heavy user of Evernote, but with the purchase of an Office365 tenant to handle my emails I converted over to OneNote, and then after a while…
bing … bing … Everyone knows that sound. My phone, watch, tablet, all making noises to say “ HEY LOOK AT ME ” and rarely is it anything important. On a normal day, I have about 60-100 notifications on my devices; Each one of these pulls my attention away from my current focus, and while I’ve got better at managing these “micro interruptions” it is still…
I walked away from Apple, my Macbook Pro, and OSX about a year ago. It was time for a upgrade and I spent time looking across the market to decide what my next workhorse machine should be, driven mostly by specs I ended up selecting a Surface Pro 6, and unfortunately, I made a mistake. The Surface Pro, even after six iterations of the product, feels half cooked, tries to do everything but…
My first reading of Getting Things Done ( archive.org ) (GTD) by David Allen was back around 2007. I was inspired by Merlin Mann ( archive.org ) to pickup the book and give it a try and while I never did finish that first full read through it changed how I thought of task management. For years and years i’d been a mess when it came to fulfilling my commitments, like the examples in GTD…
I’ve been a half invested Getting Things Done ( archive.org ) (GTD) practitioner for the better part of ten years, probably even longer. Over time my workflow has changed from a basic Filofax and paper notes to numerous applications, Todoist and Evernote were the longest serving applications by far, but even they headed towards the chopping block once the subscription fees started ramping…
It is not unusual to find many people jaded at best about the value of goal-setting, given the stress created by what are often perceived as artificial expectations decreed from on high. - David Allen ( archive.org ) Nothing sums up my experiences with goals better than that quote. I’ve been a recurrent “goal breaker” for many years, in that every goal I set myself I either fail…