Nostalgic story about the flat I just paid off. It’s a one bed flat with
a living room and a kitchen. I painted it all, tiled the small hallway
and the bathroom and the kitchen back splash. The leftover back splash
tiles are on one wall in my utility room bathroom in my house.
Anyway, as I was doing all this, my mom talked about her own flat in
Brooklyn. She had it for a little while after she left the nunny-bunnies
and before she got together with my dad. It was clear it meant a lot
to her but I didn’t really realise why till after she passed. Wish I’d
figured it out before.
I’m back to managing AWS infra so looked into the state of terraform
and opentofu. From looking at the repos and viewing the issues it seems
that most of the activity is on the opentofu side in terms of features.
It also seems more responsive to community issues.
I’ve spent the past month rebuilding bulletin, a bbs-like system I
used in college. In doing so I ended up doing a bunch of SQL.
Go is a much more strongly typed language than things like Python
or Perl. A lot of my previous experience with doing SQL was in those
languages. So doing SQL in Go has been interesting.
I’m not a fan of ORMs in any language. In production I need to be able
to connect misbehaving SQL to code and ORMs almost always get in the
way of that. For performant SQL you need to understand, well, SQL.
Not the vague DSL that an ORM tries to make.
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. Besides,
installing on local hardware was the eventual goal. Unfortunately
hardware is annoyingly slow when constantly rebooting it.
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:
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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. If anyone has better ideas for
cleaning up local branches, please pass them on. I still haven’t sorted
comments, but feel free to send me an email or ping me on twitter.
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:
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systemctl --user status pulseaudio.service
systemctl --user status pulseaudio.socket
Both of these were returning an error that no modules were loaded and
they just quit.
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. In addition I use
Sennheiser HD 4.50 BTNC Bluetooth headphones for video calls
but they’re a bit tight for longer use.
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?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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. The simplest solution is one or more USB hubs.
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. Lots of green with some colour
from flowers. Honestly if you caught me away from home and asked me to
draw it I wouldn’t come close. I am not an expert in art or photography
but I doubt it would win any art prizes. I doubt it would even sell on
ebay, nevermind sell for very much.
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. The cashier gives
me my receipt and then starts handing me oldish US one dollar bills. I
look on the receipt and it says I’m owed change for $20. I’m confused
and ask what’s going on, and he says I’m owed $320.27 in change. I look
at the receipt and sure enough, it also says that.
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.
Then I ran this:
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