Recent content in Posts on Secluded.Site
If you’re wondering why I like system containers, see the previous post, LXD: Containers for Human Beings. Installation Note: the instructions below say to install LXD using Snap. I personally dislike Snap, but LXD is a Canonical product and they’re doing their best to promote it as much as possible. Incus is a fork of LXD by the primary creators and maintainers and one of the first…
This is a blog post version of a talk I presented at both Ubuntu Summit 2022 and SouthEast LinuxFest 2023. The first was not recorded, but the second was and is on SELF’s PeerTube instance. I apologise for the terrible audio, but there’s unfortunately nothing I can do about that. If you’re already intimately familiar with the core concepts of VMs or containers, I would suggest…
I’ve been co-hosting Linux Lads for a couple years and recently started co-hosting Linux Downtime. I mention them on the home page of this site, but didn’t consider that there are potentially many people subscribed to my RSS feed(s) that never actually look at my home page ^^' A couple of weeks ago, someone suggested I write an announcement so RSS subscribers can see it. This is that…
Hello! o/ You must follow my RSS feed :) I’ve decided to start publicising some posts exclusively over RSS because I quite like the idea. Taking a page out of the creator’s book, It’s my pledge to use this secret communication channel to share a little more deeply. Maybe it’s something personal, maybe it’s something in progress, maybe it’s a soft launch. Monthly’ish Easter eggs for…
I’ve recently noticed that many of my peers are sometimes overwhelmed by the internet; they feel as if they’re stretched too thin and that their attention is constantly shifting between too many different platforms. I think a portion of that feeling comes from systems that bombard them with push notifications. In games, this introduces a sense of urgency because you want make the most…
For a long time, I was so vehemently opposed to analytics on personal websites that I condemned people using privacy-respecting systems like Plausible on their blog, shouting about mUh PrIvAcY and saying that these platforms only boosted the bloggers’ ego and they would end up writing for their readers rather than personal enjoyment. I’m realising that I was kinda dumb 🤔 One of my…
One of the things many of us struggle with when setting friends and family up with Linux is remote support. Commercial solutions like RealVNC and RustDesk do exist and function very well, but are often more expensive than we would like for answering the odd “I can’t get Facebook open!” support call. I’ve been on the lookout for suitable alternatives for a couple years but…
Many people will disagree but I think IRC is still one of the best chat platforms there is for a number of reasons. However, the documentation surrounding it is sometimes lacking, commands are esoteric and can differ from server to server, some networks have stupid requirements/defaults, etc. But who says you have to join them? IRC is very easy to set up, use, and maintain and this post should be…
Omar Roth, the developer of Invidious, recently wrote a blog post about Stepping away from open source. While I never used the official instance, I thought this was a good opportunity to create a tool that downloads videos from YouTubers I’m subscribed to so I can watch them offline in whatever manner I prefer. To that end, youtube-dl is by far the most reliable and versatile option. Having…
The idea I’ve found it very difficult to stick to a regular schedule for #100DaysToOffload for various reasons. Chief among them is simply that I don’t have enough time with everything else I have going on; what I want to write and the ideas I’ve had take longer to get on paper (or screen) than I’m able to dedicate at the moment. 1 However, I love the intent behind it and…
I just got a couple of new (and rather expensive) fonts. So far, I’m incredibly happy with them and think it was money well-spent for a few reasons. Created by Matthew Butterick, Valkyrie and Concourse are simply beautiful. I don’t know which I like more but they both have their places on this website and will find their way onto others in the future. Because Concourse is a sans-serif,…
After a poll by @karan , I started thinking about where I get my news and decided to subscribe to LWN . Their content is really good, they’ve been running for a long time, and I want to support their work. However, I think the default theme is quite terrible. I spent about an hour last night messing with it and I think I improved it significantly; it’s based on the theme of this site.…
Much to my chagrin, I’ve hardly posted anything at all the past couple of weeks. This is partly due to university summer classes starting and partly due to me putting some work into NixNet’s documentation. After listening to Episode 4 of 2.5 Admins, I decided to change some things up with my infrastructure planning and, instead of automating all the things, document it first. Only…
Let me put a little disclaimer right here at the beginning: I don’t use my mobile phone how a lot of people do so your mileage will vary. I also say “Mostly” in the title because it’s incredibly difficult to completely remove Google from Android though some projects have done a very good job of it. My motivation In short, I value my privacy and Google is about as far from…
Today, our primary purpose was to gather information. We rose, ate a quick breakfast, and then headed into the city. Saltmarsh is a very busy, bustling little town. Ships were loading and unloading at the docks, there were taverns, historical centres, statues, restaurants, people going about their day and hurrying off in this direction or that, etc. In the distance and to the right, we noticed a…
I recently started using calcurse for my calendar and one of its limitations is good notification support in the generally accepted meaning of the word. The developer has a different opinion and that’s perfectly alright but traditional notifications are a feature I heavily rely on and calcurse doesn’t handle handle them very well; it leaves the user to figure something out on their…
I’m a fan of using as little JavaScript as feasible on a website and implementing a scroll-to-top button in JS is just ridiculous. Nevertheless, there seems to be a plethora of copypasta for it so I thought I would write about implementing one in pure HTML and CSS. The title is just a playful poke at Kev Quirk who recently posted about exactly the same thing but with different styling 😉…
I’m only 8 days into 100 Days To Offload and I’ve already missed two. The biggest reason is that this is finals week and all my time right now is taken up by studying for exams. As I said on the Fediverse (dead link to post), I have been exhausted the past little while and I’m not getting nearly as much sleep as I really need. I’ve enjoyed it so far but I’m going to…
I haven’t been able to come up with a specific topic for today so this is just a kind of generic update about me. Zettelkasten In my previous post about Vim, I briefly mentioned being inspired to create a Zettelkasten by Daryl Sun in his fourth 100 Days To Offload post. A Zettelkasten is a personal knowledge management tool that allows one to quickly retrieve useful information about a…
I’ve recently decided to attempt to keep all of my notes and everything I’ve learned in a Zettelkasten. After reading Daryl Sun’s blog post, I started looking more into the method and found it incredibly intriguing. I’ve tried the “Evernote way” of throwing everything I come across in a single place but it inevitable gets lost. I don’t remember what it was…
When I was younger, I prided myself on being a classical musician. I played piano and organ, I was in a nearby fine arts university’s choir (singing soprano of course), and, quite honestly, I was rather stuck up about it. I didn’t know any bluegrass musicians so I had never really interacted with them or gotten “into” the genre but, whenever my mother would show me a group…
Well I had planned to write a post about music this evening but I just spend two hours making the post’s cover image, a guitar. Lately, I’ve been basing my images on Feather Icons or Font Awesome. I might download one to use as a reference, download and modify, etc. but I’ve stopped using the icons as they are. This guitar, however, is an exception; I used the Bezier Pen and…
The other day, I decided that I wanted to start streaming. I’ll definitely be playing some games but I might also stream some other things like me playing music. We’ll see where that goes. In any case, I don’t like relying on third parties for things and didn’t want to use Twitch so I started figuring out how to build my own open source and privacy-friendly…
A fedizen, Kev Quirk, issued a challenge (dead link to fedi post) yesterday and I decided to take him up on it. In the time between then and now, he’s actually set up a website for participants to submit their posts; it’s called (quite fittingly) 100 Days To Offload (dead link to website). I’m going to attempt to keep up with it for the next 100 days and see where it takes me.…
Continuing with my journey into the world of pipe smoking, I thought I would show what my cellar 1 looks like. It’s not much—just some jars and a pipe stand on my dresser—but it’s more than what I’ve seen some other people have 2 . I’ll talk about tobacco in another post; this one is just about what’s on the left of the picture below. The paper is something I saw in a…
I just created a new category called Meta and it’ll be used for updates about this website and about me. The first thing is that I didn’t realise until a few minutes ago that the RSS feeds only had summaries of my posts; that issue has been fixed and the full content is available in each one now. The second thing is some of my plans for this site. Until now, NixNet has been my online…
My first computer was an Acer C710 Chromebook. There were a lot of problems with it but one thing I always appreciated were its dead keys. Until a few days ago, I had completely forgotten what the feature was called. Once I figured it out, however, I was able to do some digging and find the answer fairly quickly. Dead keys Dead keys 1 are actually a type of modifier, like Ctrl or Shift . They…
A few days ago, @klaatu asked if anyone was up for a game of D&D 5e. I didn’t notice it until I saw @ShellOwl’s reply (dead link to reply on fedi) in my local timeline and simply had to join in; my last D&D campaign has been put on hold for the foreseeable future but of course I still want to play. We met up last Thursday, had our first session, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself;…
The Lord of the Rings is one the greatest book series I have ever read as well as one of my favourite movie trilogies; when I was younger, I watched them so often that I knew almost exactly where all the scenes were in the timeline and could quote a fair few of the lines verbatim 😉 Pipe smoking was very prominent throughout, from the hobbits to the humans to the dwarves, and I was always…
With the emergence of COVID-19, our university shutting down, and everything going remote, this campaign has ended. Our DM and a few of the other guys don’t like playing without face-to-face interaction. It’s unfortunate but I do understand; half of our sessions consisted of us being complete dumbasses and dying laughing at something stupid one of us did. I did have half-finished notes…
I recently posted about getting through 487 feed items in less than half an hour and I thought I would write about my setup here. There are three primary applications that require some configuration: Feed reader Browser Read-it-later service Tiny Tiny RSS My feed reader of choice is TT-RSS. It’s one of the most advanced readers I’ve ever used and can be tailored for any workflow. My…
Reading methods Today, I learned that there are three primary ways people read. The first and most common is mental reading and this is when you “say” the words in your head as if you were speaking them. 1 I find this useful when writing because it’s as if I’m actually speaking them; picking out sentences and phrases that don’t sound quite right is easier. In writing…
Today was, quite honestly, average for this band. Before I get into what happened, however, I had better introduce myself. I am Krozn’ik, a half-orc. I know not where I was born save that the entirety of my village was slaughtered and I was raised by one of the knights party to the massacre. I was incredibly young at the time so he is the only father I have ever really known. We never had…
Forward Every month, Linux Academy releases courses for free. I’m a very busy college student and don’t have time to whirl through everything I want to before it goes behind their paywall again so I figured out how to download a course or two every month using youtube-dl . Setup Install youtube-dl Make sure you have a browser handy Create a community account on Linux Academy Get some…
Preface If you simply want to remove your website and nothing else, read through the setup and verifying identities sections then continue from the For domains you own section of the previous post. If you’re wanting to address accounts/profiles on websites you don’t own, read on. In addition to dealing with the Wayback Machine, this article is also supposed to help you get started…
Preface There may be a myriad of reasons you want to do this, from removing sensitive information to regaining a measure of control over your content. Whatever your purpose, below should be a quick and easy way to achieve it. For domains you own The easiest way to verify you own a domain is to put a text file in an easily accessible location and email info@archive.org asking for removal and link…
We all love the CLI (and if we don’t, we should) so wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool to see your weather forecast with a single command? Ceda EI at webionite.com has written a tool that uses the Dark Sky API to give you the forecast for a day or week, at your location, and in Celsius or Fahrenheit. Celsius Weather for one week - $ curl sky.webionite.com/location Weather for…
Package configuration As I said in the last post, this is the file in which you list the applications you wish to install. I won’t list the defaults because there a lot. However , this basic setup only builds to a total of ~440 MB so you can add many more applications. I want the setup on this bootable to be exactly the same as what I currently have on my system. I did not want to manually…
I think I’m going to call it a spin . . . Install the package archiso from the official repos or archiso-git from the AUR $ mkdir ~/<build-directory> Replace <build-directory> with wherever you want the iso build to be stored. This is where we’ll be spending all of our time configuring. Mine is at ~/liveiso/ and that’s the path I’ll be using in this and future posts $ sudo…
Today I had an orthodontist appointment and a voice lesson. The appointment was at 15:00 and the voice lesson at 16:00. I got to the orthodontist’s office 10 minutes early, was told to right to the back (like always), I sat down in the seat, and the orthodontist came over after a few minutes with another patient. He looked at my teeth, had me put my retainers in, checked how they fit, then…
I’ve been trying off and on for the past few weeks to figure out how to record my 1920x1080 monitor. The recording is going to be some music videos for a friend. Originally, it was just going to be a single background image for the whole video then I had the idea of using cava in a transparent terminal on top of the background. This didn’t work at all because it actually kept freezing…