Tutorial

From day one on the Macbook I looked at how I could make this thing work for me in a way I was accustomed to. I come from Linux, a world of endless possibilities. In the 15+ years I used it as my main system, I got a certain workflow that was my own. People used to joke that I didn’t need to lock my laptop when I was away, as it was unusable to anyone else. I didn’t use a bar. A logged in system would show nothing but the wallpaper. Pressing the super (Windows) key did nothing. Right clicking the desktop did nothing. Sure, a Linux window manager user would press super + enter and they would be greeted by Kitty, my terminal emulator, but no Windows user would press that combination. ...

I don’t like a messy home. Home is where all your stuff lives and if you want to find something, it’s easier if there’s not a bunch of clutter in the way. This is true in your physical home and your digital $HOME. Most Linux distributions and macOS populate your $HOME with directories you never asked for. The difference is whether you can rid yourself of them. On Linux they come from xdg-user-dirs. You can remove or disable it, delete the directories, and they stay gone. macOS has no such switch: delete its home directories and the system quietly recreates them. So on the Mac you can’t remove them… but you can hide them. ...

LUKS, Linux Unified Key Setup, is a way to encrypt partitions on Linux. It’s a good way to store sensitive data on a flash drive or on your main system. Usage is super simple. You issue a command to unlock it and it will prompt you for your passphrase. After entering the right one, you can mount the partition and use it as normal. When you’re done with it, you umount the partition and lock it with another command. Without the right passphrase the data on the partition is just noise. ...

This is going to be a long one. I have spent countless hours setting up my Proxmox VE and the VM’s and LXC containers on it. It occurred to me that it might be wise to have a decent backup solution for this, in case something goes catastrophically wrong. Luckily Proxmox provides a ready-made solution for this and it is called Proxmox Backup Server or PBS for short. This post will go through how I set this up on my system. ...

I’ve mentioned before that I have my website’s repository mirrored across multiple Git hosts. Well, it is not just the website; it is all my repositories. I have four hosts, namely: GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, and Bitbucket. This is overkill, I know. I really like it, though. It gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling knowing my precious crap is safe. If one host goes down, I’ve got three others. If two go down, there are still two left. And if three go down… well, there’s probably something far more serious going on, but let’s not get distracted. ...

In many languages there’s a need to add decorations, or glyphs to characters, like for example é or č. These are called diacritics. These characters don’t exist on a US Standard qwerty keyboard. There is the US International version with dead keys, which allow for crafting these special characters by pressing the desired diacritic key followed by the character to apply it to. So for example pressing ~ followed by n results in an ñ. ...

I have a homelab, or more simply a personal server I run at home. It’s a small square black box that sits in my office, humming away. This server runs Proxmox VE, a hypervisor. This controls pretty much everything that goes on, on this server. It has the ability to spin up containers, which it calls LXC’s. These are somewhat akin to Docker containers. Anyway, the process of spinning one of these up is super simple. Click a few buttons, allocate some space and there’s your ‘container’. ...