Tutorial

On my homelab I had an LXC named “debian”. It was a generic Debian install which served a multitude of uses, most of which I forgot over time. I was going through all my LXCs due to my previous adventure, where I set up a domain name with an SSL certificate for the services on my homelab. I got to this one and wondered what the heck this was for. Turns out a Kali build environment, several defunct scripts, and hosting two different long abandoned personal projects. Lord knows what else this box was subjected to in the past. ...

I have a homelab. It runs many services for me, each in their own little container with its own IP address. Considering none of these services are ever reachable from outside my network (apart from if you’re connected to my VPN), I never felt the need to introduce domain names or HTTPS/SSL. I had a simple web page that had a bunch of links to the IP addresses—complete with port numbers—that I used to navigate these services in my Firefox-based browser: Librewolf. ...

For a while I have been bitching about YouTube. Here, here, and here just on this site alone. I’ve moaned about it on Discord and in real life too. My main gripes are it’s all AI slop and there’s nothing worth discovering on the homepage of the site anymore. You could keep scrolling and never hit anything worth watching anymore. Unfortunately this didn’t seem to dissuade me from trying anyway. I found myself mindlessly typing the domain in the address bar only to tumble down this list of pointless video thumbnails never actually clicking anything to watch. I could do this for far longer than I’d care to admit to. And I did often. ...

When I got the reMarkable 2 I enjoyed using it very much. It was my go-to way of taking notes in class. Unfortunately after a while, the need to take notes like that vanished, as we went from mainly listening to mainly doing. Now I found myself behind my laptop all day and if the need to take a note arose, launching a quick terminal/micro combination was faster than pulling out the reMarkable. And so it sat in my backpack losing battery until one day it eventually got laid to rest in a drawer in my desk at home. ...

It’s hard to pick which book to read next. Especially if you have many. I’ve spent far too much time in front of my bookcases, pondering what’s next. Still, standing there I can pull a book and read the jacket. Put it back, read another. On and on until something tickles my fancy. This is impossible with e-books on a Kindle. I just have a massive list of way too many books sitting there with no real way to discover the next binge. I’d either pick at random and live with my choices, or google titles for blurbs on another device. Title after title after title after title… wait—what was that first one again? It’s no way to live. ...

A bar is used on a Linux Window Manager to display information like the date, time, volume information and maybe most importantly, on which desktop you are. Most people add way more to their bar, like CPU usage, memory usage, system temperature, hard drive space usage, connection state and many many more. It’s also a part of the look of your desktop which you’re supposed to rice, screenshot and put on /r/unixporn1. ...

The MacBook keyboard layout is wrong. Control goes in the bottom left corner, but for some reason fn is chilling there. My old ThinkPad also had them in the wrong order. I hate this so, so much, and clearly more people dislike it, as the ThinkPad has an actual dedicated BIOS setting to swap the two. Now the Mac offers the ability to change what the keys do too, at least it seems to. Unfortunately, changing the setting in Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Modifier Keys does nothing for me. Not a clue if this is a me problem or a macOS one. ...

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. ...

A little indicator on my prompt tells me the state of the git repo I’m in, if I’m in one. It’s quite minimal. Green tick: repo is clean; yellow cross: there are changes; red dot: there are merge conflicts. It’s a nice visual cue and for the longest time and the following code in my ~/.zshrc file made it possible. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 git_status_prompt() { git rev-parse --git-dir >/dev/null 2>&1 || return if git diff --name-only --diff-filter=U 2>/dev/null | grep -q .; then echo " %F{red}●%f" elif git status --porcelain 2>/dev/null | grep -q .; then echo " %F{yellow}✘%f" else echo " %F{green}✓%f" fi } This works fine. It does what it’s supposed to… It’s ugly though. ...