Unix Greybeard

I love Proxmox, but I’ve always preferred to have a more modular style. There’s a lot to be said about ‘batteries included’ hypervisors with all the bells and whistles all set up for you automatically. But what if you want to use other elements of another hypervisor with them not meant for them specifically? Often…

I found this screenshot from a couple days ago, but it illustrates something I’ve known subjectively for a long time now: ZFS is the mother of all sequential read filesystems, but it’s quite a bit “slower” than other common filesystems (especially non-cow). That’s mainly because Linux uses a boatload of tiny files necessary to be…

Octocat Birthday celebration site unsurprisingly located on… wait for it… GitHub Pages: https://nomangul.github.io/octocat-day/ I thought this was so cute, I thought I’d put it up real quick. I found it while wondering in earnest when I had signed up for GitHub. Turns out it was a lot earlier than I remembered – not that I’ve…

There’s lots of great backup tools out there – borg, rdiffbackup, bareos, zfs and btrfs send/receive, pvesync, etc. and the cutest mascotted backup program ever, of course, pikabackup (it’s adorable!) all with their own traits and best-practice use cases. I have to say, though, call me DIY, a glutton for punishment, or just plain nerdy,…

I was looking at datasets on data.wa.gov to see what might be fun for a project, and I came across public info disclosing the amount paid to employ WA state lobbyists. It’s a very localized representation of interests attempting to influence politics and policy for our residents and lawmakers, as it represents money spent only…

Does anyone else sense the irony? Yes, Arch Linux is available from the Microsoft Store, and no, I’m not kidding. Go ahead and see for yourself: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9mznmnksm73x?hl=en-us&gl=US My immediate reaction when I saw this was, “woah, really?”, “that’s crazy”, and, “I never thought I’d see this day”, and I wonder if it’s as jarring to…

This is a little beginner command-line demonstration for finding the results you need most. A lot of the time in the command line, a simple ls can return way more than any one person can reasonably deal with. Most people know how to use ls with extension flags: ls *.sh ; ls -a ; ls…

Quick little command line kung fu job with this parser called column It’s in the util-linux package, which, if I am remembering correctly, is included by default in basically any release outside of netboot and cloud images this demonstrates why it’s included: It’s required by basically all of the setup infrastructure packages (makes sense). But…

There’s always issues here or there trying to incorporate container apps with the desktop, due to their sandboxed nature and subsequent lack of out-of-the-box feature parity with their distro-packaged and supported counterparts. This is not a post about how awesome Obsidian is, but if you haven’t heard of it, I recommend checking it out: https://obsidian.md/…

Hasn’t everybody deleted some stuff in the command line, wishing they had a way to get it back? Well, by default there are no do-overs. That’s where rmw comes in: rmw creates a trash can for your command line, so even after you delete some files (as long as you use it), you should be…