Motivation I have an old Intel macbook 12 of begin 2016, one of the so-called "Retina Macbooks". It is an ideal couch device but far too slow to run modern OS-X, provided you wanted to run that to begin with. I wanted to revive this machine to avoid lugging the BIG laptop, especially for the friday SystemCrafters stream in my comfy chair in the living. I saw some experience reports with Ubuntu,…
Screenshots in Sway with Guix Home Manager A blog post documented an elegant way to configure screenshots in wayland using grim and grimshot . After moving my sway config to use the GUIX sway-service to generate the config file Iost my configured screenshot bindings. Output Files The screenshots will be placed in the Pictures/screenshots folder with the timestamp as filename. To avoid duplication…
Background Like a lot of people I've had a long history managing passwords and secrets over the years. From a little black book, over an Excel sheet, using a GPG encoded secrets file (works really well with Emacs gpg support), 1password (till they racked up their prices), lastpass (till they got bought by the Evil LogMeIn Corp), KeepassXC and lately pass . I was perfectly happy with KeepassXC for…
Samba or CIFS file sharing is a finicky area at best, but widely used, especially since it was heavily pushed by Microsoft in the Windows ecosystem, This makes it widely used in corporate and NAS environments and even for Linux file sharing. In this post I will look at some ways to use CIFS file sharing as a client. Personally I find hardly any uses for Samba file serving nowadays from my compute…
Refactoring my Emacs Config It is time to work on my Emacs config. Not because it is hopelessly broken, but to prevent that from happening. A long time ago I had a literate config I had to declare Emacs bankrupcy on because of the amount of cruft and lack of TLC. It had grown to a 4000 line 100kB+ inconsistent mess. It was nice to have evrything in a single file with documentation in place. To…
Table of Contents Managing Secrets using Pass Installation GUIX Debian, Ubuntu et al Emacs Integration Enable the Unix Password Store. Helper Function Using in Emacs Configuration Shell integration DirEnv integration Tips Entering passwords on the terminal Getting fields from multi field secrets Managing Secrets using Pass On UNIX there is a well known tool to manage secrets called password-store…
Table of Contents Install Cuirass in Guix Create a postgresql server Enable the cuirass service Enabling the Web Frontend Submitting jobs Figure out a more elegant way to submit jobs Install Cuirass in Guix I had a hard time installing cuirass on my system. I tried to collect some notes to move step by step to a working solution. GUIX is great that it is really easy to revert your step to get out…
Terraform Deployments Terraform allows infrastructure to be defined to deploy applications and other solutions as code and supports a plethora of on-premise and cloud deployment targets. It is essentially based on building a graph of dependencies between resources, data and modules using the terraform language. Due to the nature of the beast these things tend to run in the CI pipelines which makes…
Table of Contents KeePassXC from flatpak Allow access to the socket file keepassxc-proxy Configure Chrome Configure Brave Configure Firefox references KeePassXC from flatpak More and more browsers are coming packaged in containers like flatpak or snaps. Especially the ones of the chromium variety. Since browsers are at the best of times scary things with arbitrary code being executed in every…
Inconsistent output in REPL When doing the examples in the Practical Common Lisp book I had confusing output in the repl when prompting the user for CDs using SBCL. ; Dedicated output stream setup (port 46185) ; Redirecting all output to this MREPL ; SLY 1.0.43 (#<MREPL mrepl-1-1>) CL-USER> (prompt-for-cd) Title: Unplugged Eric Clapton 8 y Apparently a similar issue was first found on MacOSX and…
Intercepting Bluetooth Keyboard Events I like keyboards and I like custom keyboards. However many do not allow sufficient configuration to let a key be Ctrl on hold and Esc on top. Notably the HHKB. USB devices are nicely listed in /dev/input/by-id/ folder but on my system the event device is anonymously placed in /dev/input/ . Figuring out the name ❯ for dev in /dev/input/*; do udevadm info…
For reasons I keep a set of machines where I regularly work on in sync so they offer a familiar environment. This includes a dual boot desktop (Ubuntu/Windows+WSL), laptop (Arch/Windows+WSL), a VPS(Arch) doing stuff, a virtual Ubuntu thing which is always running to monitor stuff on my NAS, and a Steam deck (Arch kinda). I expect these to be familiar environments so I can do some light development…
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Why I have been using Emacs in WSL2 using an X server running in Windows and that works fine as long as long as the computer does not go to sleep. When the computer goes to sleep, the X connection is cut and the emacs process crashes. I like to just have my emacs session available so I can continue where I was last time and I like my computer to go to sleep when I not use it because Global…
Each time I login using the PIN of my Microsoft account, my mounted folders on the NAS are not mounted. After login I get a notification that not all mounted drives could be connected. When double clicking on the failed mount I get a silly error regarding duplicate sessions or something, and I can access after logging in. This is irritating, but also breaks automations like auto importing notes…
I'd like to blog more notes on stuff I do and it would be nice to have a smooth workflow in my editor of choice. It is too late to explain a lot, but all these things were proudly found elsewhere. See the references list at the end of this post. Creating the blog project To deploy to github as a personal blog you have to create a repo in the form <username>.github.io . Since I name my projects the…
I configure all apps I can to use vim keybindings. Which means I use the Escape key very often. On my custom keyboards I have usually QMK or similar available to remap the keys and use a tap on the CapsLock to mean Escape and hold to mean Control . On the macbook pro I used Karabiner to program the same effect. And even on Windows I found a AutoHotKey script. On Linux I use an event interceptor…
I have some latex templates to format documents to create fancy formal looking PDF versions of my plaintext mode documents I create in org-mode in emacs , well spacemacs actually. Installation Since this are tools built in the UNIX world I expected a protracted battle before I got all settings right, especially since there was no version of Live Tex in the chocolatey repositories. I never tried…
Environment variable have gained a lot of importance since the rise of the container based deployments and (consequently) the popularity of the 12 factor app . It also has become very practical with the widespread support of the .env file in the project folder which makes configuring apps during development very practical. Using environment in Rust The std::env package gives access to the…
There are essentially 2 methods for compiling Gtk apps using msvc compiler and .LIB files using "gnu" backend and msys2 libraries It is a pick your poison situation, the first option requires unpacking zip files and organizing stuff so the rust compiler can find the libraries and the runtime the DLLs. The other option requires configuring rust to essentially cross compile to the…
Ubuntu contains a nice notification system to talk to the user about noteworthy events. However when the message dissappears, by default, it is gone. Often I am busy with something else when the notification pops up and I pay little notice. Then somewhere in my brain, something gets triggered by a word, and by the time I focus on the message to really read it, the message disappears. Some of these…
Preparing Plone to start the WebDAV service and setting the permissions to allow the users to make use of it is only half the battle, actually using it, especially from automated systems like build servers is another struggle. Using the Cadaver WebDAV client Although WebDAV is currently well integrated in modern desktop environments, a CLI alternative is useful for automation, like Jenkins build…
2011-07-22 Fri 16:33 Figure out proxy settings Linux Ubuntu has a Network Proxy chooser which allows you to select a location (a la MacOSX). This works well enough except that the UI is a bit counter-intuitive (in my humble opinion)which causes me to regularly nuke some predefined setting inadvertently. This is not a big deal though. However for update manager (and several other tools) to pick up…
Dotfiles, can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. Dot files are the term for folders and files starting with a '.' so they do not show upwhen using plain ls . Tha Mac has a cool keycode to toggle visibility of dotfiles in the File Open/Save dialog, but this does not work in the finder for one reason or another. In practice this meant I had to deal with dotFiles and dotDriectories I found on…
Overview and Goals We build our solutions mostly on Ubuntu Natty and we deploy to Debian (currently lenny). One problem we face is that Debian has a slow release cycle and the packages are dated. Before a new release is approved and deployed to our target servers it can still take many months causing us to have to use up to 3 year old technology. So we are often faced to 'backport' packages or…
Org Mode can use the idle time to correct time tracking entries. On the Mac this works on the idle time of the computer, on other platforms it uses the idle time of emacs. Hence if you do a significant task in another program it will be idle for org-mode. There is a little program delivered with org-mode sources to estimate the "real" idle time based on the information used by screensavers.…
The Mac has a great utility called Divvy to easily map windows to loacation on the screen using the keyboard. Fiddling with the mouse to get multiple windows in the right location is a productivity killer and a pain in the neck (or shoulder, or elbow, or …) Ubuntu (and of course any other Linux distro with compiz) has a similar feature built in as a plugin for compiz. Type Alt-F2 and enter ccsm +…
Not a big thing, actually for me it is. I am always struggling with proxy settings. It requires a lot of different incantations to be done, every program deals with it differently, support for platform settings is flaky, ... Grails deals with this is a way which pleasantly surprised me : > grails add-proxy <name> --host=<hostname> --port=<portno> e.g. grails add-proxy client --host=proxy…
Recently our sonar installation on our Hudson CI choked again, this time with an error I have not seen before. It was just before the release of an important milestone for the team, so not being unable to publish new version on the test server could not come on a worse time. In the Console Log of a failing built we found the message. \[INFO\]…
Since we write a lot of stuff for use in the production side of the business we need to comply with rules which allow effective control that the processes and procedures have been followed. In the automotive industry people take these measures seriously. One of these requirements we often get is that all configuration data elements must contain information on who created this information and when,…
I went to the PMI Benelux Day today. The theme today was A symphony of Knowledge, a theme which ran through the plenary sessions topics. I choose to see the use of earned value techniques applied to the Galileo project presented by Francois Picaut. It was interesting to see how this technique was applied in a quite straightforward manner by just entereing the AC provided by the accountants and the…
Lately I hear a lot of Java bashing from a very vocal part of the Linux community. I do a lot of Java, I use Linux on my main laptop and I like this just fine. I use daily freemind (Java mindmapper) and openoffice (which is Java enabled). I was doing this for the past years since Windows XP ate my C-drive for the N-th time (and now it did the same on my gaming rig at home, grrr... ). I keep a…
Something I already knew became suddenly clear today : the product or product pieces in the WBS and the relation to the activities. Although I already knew for a long time that it is good practice to make the WBS deliverable oriented instead of activity oriented it remained always a gradient where activities blended seamlessly in deliverables. The key was that I used a mental trick derived from…
In java6 there is a bug in the 64-bit linux version of the jvm which causes eclipse to crash when opening projects with some aditional plugins installed. Both the openjdk as the sun versions are affected. for more info see : Bug #206620 in openjdk-6 (Ubuntu) Bug#478560: sun-java6-jdk: SIGSEGV when loading Eclipse workspace In the mean time this has been fixed in openjdk7, but this might take a…
The symptom is that after starting sometimes there is some blurp dialog and afterwards the Tip of the Day dialog appears. This stays grey and the application accepts no more events. You need to kill it to get out of there. This happens at the place which is protected by a firewall and has no transparent proxy. At home it worked fine albeit on my Macbook and not on my Ubuntu laptop. The reason is…