Links 2024-07-26

A really useful guided tour of flake.nix. I've been using flakes since I started with Nix. Reading this article clarified a few things and helped me pick up a few new tricks. At the Mountains of Madness tells the backstory that led to the creation of Madness, a tool to easily run the same binary on NixOS as well as other systems.

This $20+ NanoKVM (a tiny low-power RISC-V KVM over IP solution) might be a good addition to my homelab. It would have been really useful when I upgraded Proxmox, something went wrong and I had to rescue my system plugging in keyboard and monitor. Pre-orders available.

I've also been tempted to add Authelia & lldap: Authentication, SSO, User Management & Password Reset for Home Networks. Absolutely overkill and not really high in my priority list. Given my services are accessible via Tailscale it might be easier to just use Tailscale authentication for Nginx.

🤖 Oz, Ender's Game & my favorite e-ink devices is a good review of e-ink devices with an unexpected nice use-case for LLMs.

Hacks: PySkyWiFi: completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights and from Linux to NetBSD with SSH only. While we're talking about NetBSD: why I Like NetBSD, or why portability matters.

Some computer security with the six dumbest ideas in computer security and how Samba was written.

Writing GUI applications on the Raspberry Pi without a desktop environment. I don't really have a use case for this, but if I ever decide to add a screen to my RaspberryPi this might be an option.

Origin story of open source software: How to Beg/Borrow/Steal Your Way to a Cross Platform Bluetooth LE Library.

Web-design: Neo-Brutalism: a perfect fit for Smolweb sites.

After reading how to build a practical household bike generator and batteries: how cheap can they get? I know how to generate energy and where to store it :)

A couple of interesting (unrelated) stories: shoplifters love Lego. The colorful plastic toy bricks are a gold mine for criminals and Adidas vs Puma: a battle of boots and brothers.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to reach out for any comment or question.