I’ve always liked small personal blogs, one’s where someone documents specific problem they solved, without trying to optimize for algorithms or social media, so this is my version of that.
Here you’ll find notes about software engineering, homelab experiments, keyboards, photography, and whatever else I’m currently obsessed with.
I bought two 10 TB Toshiba drives for backups. One receives weekly restic backups. The other is still waiting for me to install it at another location. Together, they cost about $500, and the remote copy I bought one of them for still doesn’t exist. In the previous post, I counted those drives as part of the cost of protecting my data. This time, I want to explain what the working drive actually does, which data I chose to back up, and what remains unfinished. ...
Sherlock watches over the server with no top cover. I currently have about 3 TB of data in my main array, but I’ve bought five HDDs. One holds important data. Another protects the array if that drive fails. Two more are for backups. The fifth holds movies, TV shows, and other files I can replace. Whenever I try to explain all those purchases to myself, I have to remember where this started: I wanted to control the floor heating. ...
I’ve spent the last few months experimenting with game controls. It started with something pretty ordinary: I wanted a more comfortable key layout. I moved WASD around, changed my binds, and even handed movement over to the mouse for a while. Most of those attempts didn’t get me very far. But one of them made me look at the usual setup differently. Picture a familiar situation: you’re moving diagonally, holding W and D, while turning the camera with your mouse. Now you need to use an ability bound to E. If you use your index finger for both D and E, you have to let go of rightward movement to use the ability. Your character keeps moving, just not in the direction you wanted. ...
I recently spent some time tuning the power profiles on my laptop running CachyOS and KDE Plasma. I wanted the three buttons in KDE’s power menu to actually mean something: power-saver should make the laptop quiet and conservative on battery; balanced should behave like the normal default; performance should feel immediate, without secretly keeping power-saving limits enabled. I expected the usual result: power-saver would use the least energy, performance the most, and balanced would sit somewhere in between. ...
I ran into a small but surprisingly annoying problem with the KDE Plasma lock screen and the fingerprint reader on my ThinkPad. After opening the laptop, KDE would show the usual lock screen with the wallpaper and clock. Nothing unusual here. The problem was that the password field wouldn’t appear until I pressed a key or moved the mouse. That also meant the fingerprint reader wasn’t listening yet. So instead of: ...
I use both Russian and English keyboard layouts on my laptop, and usually don’t think about which one is active. Until I unlock the laptop. The KDE Plasma lock screen inherits the last active keyboard layout from the session. So if I was writing something in Russian before closing the lid, I can open the laptop the next morning, put my password in and got locked laptop for a couple of seconds. ...
I have wanted to start a blog for a long time. I tried a few times, even considered creating a YouTube channel, but I always came back to writing. Over the years, I have come across many small technical blogs where someone documented a very specific problem or solution. I’ve always liked these indie blogs. They may look a little old-fashioned, but that doesn’t make them any less useful. For notes, ideas, thoughts, and conference talk drafts, I already use Obsidian. I absolutely love this application. ...
Starting with Unraid 6.12.8 in February 2024, official support for ntfy.sh notifications was added to the Unraid web UI. The problem is that the integration only supports a single topic for all notifications and only allows configuring the notification title and message body. Expecting full customization through the UI would probably be unrealistic anyway. I use three ntfy channels for notifications: critical, alert, and info. This works much better for me than alternatives such as having separate channels per device. My approach is based on how I need to react to a notification rather than where it comes from. ...