Toddler Proofing systemd-boot

If you let your toddler bang on your keyboard while you boot, you might be surprised to find that it’s not booting right, afterwards. Many modern Linux distributions aren’t using LILO or Grub anymore, they’re using systemd-boot. It’s nice- fast, lots of security considerations, etc. It’s also very minimalist by default, it doesn’t even show you a prompt. So, to break out of the boot loop fugue state, hold down spacebar as the box boots....

December 22, 2023

Redirect Rot

Things decay over time. It’s true! Life is hard. Sometimes though, you see a mess that really, someone ought to have cleaned up already. :~$ curl https://gmail.com <HTML><HEAD><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8"> <TITLE>301 Moved</TITLE></HEAD><BODY> <H1>301 Moved</H1> The document has moved <A HREF="https://www.google.com/gmail/">here</A>. </BODY></HTML> Oh right, the cute name isn’t the real name anymore. Gosh it’s almost 20 years old now, I remember being so eager and excited for an invite. :~$ curl https://www....

February 9, 2023

Hell Is Other People's Deployments

Or things I fear in k8s operators and helm charts I’ve spent a lot more time going over other people’s deployments in kubernetes recently, and I’m developing a set of prejudices. Custom docker images For lots of popular server software, like Redis, there is an official build supported by both Redis the upstream and Docker Inc with a special, privileged spot in the namespace. For others, the primary corporate sponsor will have an official image....

July 15, 2022

Theme Update

Did a little site maintenance- theme update, new hugo version, all that kind of stuff. Also it turns out that all my draft posts were being built & shipped in production, which is terrible and terrifying. Really not what I want. Believe I’ve fixed that.

June 18, 2022

Make Linux Fast Again

https://make-linux-fast-again.com/ has big promises, boy oh boy. I was wondering how much I should blame the recent spate of hardware vulnerability mitigations for my laptop being pokey, so I decided to turn it off. Slamming all of those options blindly into my kernel command line worked OK- but nothing perceptible happened. /proc/cmdline is the place to go to check your changes worked end-to-end, by the way. I was, however, oddly locked out of Flatpak- but was seeing this in the kernel logs-...

May 28, 2021

Developing inside of a Dark Forest

I have these- and other- news items on my mind- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/backdoored-developer-tool-that-stole-credentials-escaped-notice-for-3-months/ https://lwn.net/Articles/853717/ For decades now, we as developers have all really benefited from a strong culture of sharing. From experience reports to polished open source projects, from stack overflow answers to professionals livecoding, it’s been almost all love and rainbows1. Unfortunately, the kind of people who break things for a living look at all of the rainbows and say “lol there are no gates here”, and are very busily and aggressively poisoning all of the wells they can find....

April 22, 2021

How to do basic shell completion

So you wrote some dumb tool for your coworkers. It works, but no one can remember the dang arguments. Half of them use zsh, the other half use fish, the grumpy loudmouth uses bash, and the new hire uses something that sounds like a tolkein reference. The documentation for everything is garbage, stackoverflow is filled with lies, and most of the available examples take up six pages. Can’t you do this simply?...

February 12, 2021

Podman Notes

more niche container system usage notes Podman is a great alternative to docker for your laptop- it’s daemonless, so when you aren’t using it, it’s not wrecking your damn battery. It also doesn’t require sudo, which feels pretty nice. wait why doesn’t this work? Hurl in --log-level=debug anywhere to figure out why things go bad. The logs are good! pull from dockerhub by default Update your registries.conf- $ cat ~/.config/containers/registries.conf [registries....

February 4, 2021

Aerc

Speaking of CLI mail programs, this is one I’ve been meaning to tour. It’s actively developed, seems a bit more ambitious about reaching for the future, and the original author is Drew DeVault, whose outspoken software freedom stuff speaks to me, as an old dork who cares about that sort of thing. Anyway, there are no binary releases, so you gotta go get it the old fashioned way- git clone https://git....

November 29, 2020

Mutt2

So Mutt 2.0 got released, so I figured it was time to take it for another spin. The gmail web client has gotten much slower and less pleasant over the years, and hopefully the rough edges on Mutt + imap have been sanded down. There are a ton of instructions floating around, and I got a little scared about “well what if this wasn’t 2.0 compatible”, so I figured I’d write down the steps again with ‘Mutt 2....

November 26, 2020