Brain Phrye

code cooking diy fiction personal photos politics reviews tools 


Talos

The goal here was to start learning how to use talos to spin up kubernetes clusters. But first there were some yaks… I’ve been wanting to run kubernetes at home, but wasn’t too keen on having to maintain the underlying OS distros. It just seemed like an annoying distraction. Happily it seemed like the talos team agreed. However, the hard part was to get started. Cloud options cost money, can be slow and usually involve their own issues. Read more


Jack in Photos

A bunch of photos of Jack from when I got him until this year.

Git Local Branch Pruning

I have fetch.prune set to true globally. This means that when I pull from remotes git will delete any remote branches that have been removed since my last pull. For gitlab merge request workflows this is really handy. However it only cleans up the remote branches, not mine. To handle local ones, I’ve aliased this command to prune-origin: 1 2 3 for b in $(git branch -l --format="%(refname:lstrip=2)"); do git show-ref --verify --quiet refs/remotes/origin/$b || git branch -d $b; done However I’m not super happy with it. Read more

Desktop Audio Source (revisited)

Last week I wrote up my desktop microphone configs. Unfortunately I didn’t fully test them. The real test was to log out and log back in again. If I’d done that I would have learned that pulseaudio hadn’t restarted it. That was due to my change to ~/.pulse/default.pa. When you log into an Ubuntu desktop, a bunch of systemd user units get run. Two of them start the pulseaudio daemon: Read more

Desktop Audio Source

One of the odd things about desktops these days is that they have loads of microphones and speakers. Which leads to the issue - which one to use? In my case I change the speaker around a lot and that generally works fine. I have an Ocean Galaxy Light which I use most of the time. I kind of thought the Bluetooth speaker thing it had was silly when I got it, but now that’s pretty much my sole use of it. Read more

Git Commit Message Spell Check

Spell checking git commit messages turns out to be oddly hard. The hook to do it in is commit-msg but there are a few problems. First is making global hooks and second is doing the checking. One might argue that you can just do this in your editor, but I usually use the -m flag on git commit so no editor gets a whack at it. Since that trick won’t really work, what are the other options? Read more


Solar Roof

Finally getting around to building the garage for my house 20 years on. I had three goals for my garage: that it be used for a car, that it has a workshop and that it gets solar power. The car bit is because I’ve seen too many garages not used for cars. Also EVs can be tasty treats, in certain circumstances, for rodents. And since I also wanted a workshop I needed to design space for both - which meant a wide garage. Read more

TV License Correspondence

I got rid of my TV years ago. In Ireland you have to pay an annual TV license fee. An Post sends out regular enforcement letter to homes that do not have a TV License. At first I was kind of annoyed about the rather threatening letters, but as time has gone on I just have fun making ridiculously friendly and goofy replies.

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Git Pipeline Status (redux)

So yesterday I wrote…

Annoyingly I can’t really generalise this script very easily. I could drive it off some settings in ~/.gitconfig but haven’t gotten around to it. For now you’ll have to add the GitLab servers you care about.

Yeah, this was way easier to do than I thought. You need to run these four commands for each gitlab server:

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Git Pipeline Status

At work I tend to pop around a lot of projects fixing (and let’s be honest, breaking) things. And since I spend a lot of time in shell it would be nice if my shell prompt would tell me the status of the pipeline of the project and branch that I’m currently in. Especially when I context switch back to a project, it would be good if cd other/project would tell me not just what branch I was in, but whether it built or didn’t. Read more

Intel NUC Display Issues

I’ve been really happy with my Intel NUC desktop, but one annoying thing is that when the displays go to sleep lots of things get messed up. The monitors lose resolution settings, windows get moved around, etc. So hunting around today I wondered if the issue might have something with the kernel putting the USB hubs to sleep. The NUC has one HDMI port but it can support up to three monitors with the other two being over the USB-C connection. Read more

Default Branch

If you want a different default branch name for git / gitlab: 1 git config --global init.defaultBranch dev On gitlab under admin/application_settings/repository you can adjust it for repos created there. This won’t affect existing repos.

A Good Day

Hanging in my hall there’s a picture. Because of how I’ve hung it, chances are at any point in time it’s a little crooked. It probably also needs some sort of frame. It’s one of those “Things To Do” I have in the back of my head. I’m not really sure what it’s of. It’s like a photo printed on canvas of a stream or a canal with a bush in it. Read more

Swiss Shopping?

This morning, I’m in Switzerland and going into work. I stop by a shop and am in the queue to buy milk and an orange. As the cashier is ringing that up I notice some Rice Krispies treats. I take one, but the package is weird. “With pork.” Er, no, look again, ok they have normal ones. So I get one of those. The cashier finishes and I tap my Bank of Ireland card. Read more

History Review

I was curious what I’d find if I looked into my top shell commands. I’ve been saving my shell history for almost four years, so I have a fair bit of data to work with. To start with - how much history. I made a ~/history file with the names of the bash and zsh history files. Annoyingly I didn’t put .zsh at the end of my zsh history files so this was the easier way. Read more

Spice Bag Tacos

Through the lockdown I was avoiding bread for goofy reasons. But I did learn to make corn tortillas. Once I felt good doing that I decided to try a more Irish version of a taco and came up with Spice Bag Tacos. First, get some corn tortillas. Or make them. I discovered you can make them on a pancake griddle and they come out fine. I can usually make them as things cook in the oven in this recipe. Read more

Uniqish

Every now and then I need to filter out lines that are mostly the same but slightly different. The uniq command can filter out lines that are duplicates (-u) but doesn’t get rid of lines that are mostly the same. I had time the last time if came up and wrote this - uniqish. Kind of curious if there are other ways to accomplish this. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 #! Read more

Git Config Includes

It turns out that you can include files in your ~/.gitconfig. One thing the docs don’t explain is that missing files are silently ignored. In addition you can include files conditionally based on where the git repo is and what the branch name is. All these make things much easier for my home dir to work across environments. For example I have a crypt repo which includes encrypted versions of my gpg keys. Read more