Often, a NixOS module will not surface an option for overriding the default filesystem path for that module's persistence. Labeled dataDir or stateDir , this option is useful for placing stateful data in a known location for backups or other organizational reasons. In the case of the Unifi module there is no such exposed option. Though Nix/NixOS has several solutions to this predicament. In the…
Here in San Luis Obispo, the downtown area's street parking has largely migrated to license plate-tied pay stations and a PayByPhone mobile app . When I began frequenting this area about ten years ago each designated street parking spot had a parking meter like you see above. It accepted coins, cards (chip or strip), and—more recently—contactless forms of payment. A given parking meter represented…
Having had—and seldom worn—an Apple watch since 2019 or so, I often found myself liking the idea of a smarter-than-typical watch but never quite aligned with the notification-heavy and tethered nature of the modern smart watch. A few months ago I came across this blog post by John Graham-Cumming in which he performs a literal engine swap of his Casio F-91W with a mainboard from Sensor Watch…
Having recently set up a new-to-me Dell R720 in a colocation provider's environment—in my quest to "own" the whole stack from metal to service—I ran into an issue with not being able to use generic or Cisco-coded SFP+/SFP trancseivers in the included Intel X520 network card. dmesg kept indicating that the transceiver was unsupported . Because of impatience and other factors, I decided to dig a bit…