Introduction

I dislike spending lots of time setting up my desktop. I like to be up and running as fast as possible. I also like Arch linux, because it’s quite barebones and light and relatively cruft-free.

Because I like to get up and running fast, I’ve made some tools to speed up this process. Check out https://git.hackerheaven.org/ekollof/desktop-installer.

Prerequisites

• A resonably high specced machine. Minimally 8 GB of memory is probably best (some packages like nerd-fonts-complete are really large and stress tmpfs. You don’t really want a desktop with less than that anyway.
• A minimal Arch installation with no users except root.
  • The following packages installed: git sudo python wget
  • If your machine has wifi, make sure these are installed for wifi-menu: dialog wireless_tools wget unzip
• A working internet connection. Pacman should at least be able to install packages.
• A bit of patience, and a cup of coffee.

How to install

I’m not going to go into installing Arch, that’s outside of the scope of this document, and it’s been documented to death already. So I’m not going to repeat that. I’m going to assume you’ve gone through this wonderful process, and have a working and booting system, with a root account, and a working internet connection.

What is this?

Just a test. I need to see if my IFTTT triggers still work the way I want.

Please ignore. (Or don’t. Do whatever you want.)

Wait, did he get rid of Wordpress?

Yes, he did. I hope you like how it turned out. I’m using Hugo with the Tranquilpeak theme.

It’s going to change my workflow though. I have to commit my new articles into a github repository, where a webhook will trigger a rebuild of the website. An IfThisThenThat recipe will take care of posting stuff to google/twitter/etc.

I’m also looking into converting other sites over, but having my first main weblog in this format is a good first step.

I did some shuffling again. I’ve moved all my websites over to FreeBSD and the venerable Caddy webserver. I also ditched SaltStack and went full Ansible for maintaining everything.

So, this releases me from quite a few nasty dependancies. The SSL implementation of Caddy is based on the internal Go one, which doesn’t need the dingy OpenSSL at all. The configuration is a lot simpler and less complex than nginx’s. If only WordPress would work on PostgreSQL, then I would be shot of MySQL as well. Yeah, I could use MariaDB, but it’s actually the same bloody thing,

Nergal was the VPS (a virtual server, for the laypeople) which used to serve this website (amongst other things). After many years of faithful service, I had to decommission it because it was draining a bit too much of my funds. So, after some furious back upping and transferring of services and data, I just turned it off and sent it to Valhalla.

So, Ave Nergal. It was fun.

Seems I need to reboot some things again. So I am now moving my websites to Digital Ocean. Right now, this website is running on Ubuntu, PHP-hhvm, and MariaDB. And everything is managed

by SaltStack. It’s a nice low-maintenance setup this way.

I might retire the VPS I have at TransIP. It’s becoming a bit of an expense that I can avoid. DigitalOcean seems to scale a lot better for me, and less of a headache to maintain with Salt.

I started vaping 2 months ago. This coincided with me quitting smoking. I made do with a Lavatube 2 Mouth to Lung device for a while. When I knew I was serious, I got myself a serious device. I explain here:

So. nowadays I wire my own custom coils and stuff. I twist kanthal and nickel wire with drills, and I fiddle with screwdrivers and cotton to get something like so:

So, I decided to make an effort to dump OpenSSL and replace it with LibreSSL. This has been mostly succesful (there are a few holdouts, but they are non-critical and they are not internet-facing, so no worries). But man, if you see how many places OpenSSL has stuck it’s grubby paws into, you would be shocked. It’s really a lot. Most of it software that has been around for a while. Also lots of stuff that many people trust. And I have seen interesting breakages from some apps that fall back to EGD for grabbing seeds. Yes, I am not kidding. This is one area where OpenSSL is extremely broken (random numbers). See http://opensslrampage.org/post/82975103611/so-the-openssl-codebase-does-get-the-time-add-it