Liam’s Personal Simple Site!#
Welcome welcome welcome! Here you’ll find many a things that are mostly entirely uninteresting. But hey, thanks for stopping by!
I ramble on here, occasionally with John Barelycorn by my side, about technology related topics that most people understand better than I. There are a few posts below but they all reside above under the “Posts” section of the site.
This site is also used as a learning ground for maintaining services running on a Linux server so the layout may change often and may not work often as well.
We keep a more serious sailing blog about our adventures of our full time afloat lives, see sailing above.
You can check out the full code for a lot of these configuration examples which are talked about here on my Github
Thanks for taking a look around!
The Final Config…. maybe One of the main things, obviously, used is the browser. I’ve been on Firefox for ages and ages now and don’t really have too many complaints. It seems a bit heavy but it isn’t Chrome at least and I like that it’s the other web engine. Plus it’s been the Linux standard for a while now.
That being said, there are obviously a few settings I like to change upon a fresh install. On NixOS you can install Firefox, great, but then you still have to manually go in and add some extensions, move the tabs to the side (Oh I’m sure glad they built that in now) and stuff like that. ...
What on earth? Ah, of course as soon as I start looking into something like this it becomes a huge rabbit hole. This time around though, not sure if it’s because I’m reading more, or just because I’ve now been around the block so many times it makes more sense, but this wasn’t too painful.
Looking over how the word of Vim has changed since it all being VimScript and Plug being the new thing, Lua has taken over and this has allowed heaps of neato new extensions and stuff to be built. How nifty, except I’ve’nt the slightest clue on how to use any of that inside my archaine configuration which I’ve just shoe-horned into my /etc/nixos/configuration.nix for the last however many years. More than 10 at this point.
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Ah, yes I’ve switched There has been for years a lot of talk about issues with Xserver and it’s wide spread defacto use in Linux. Mainly due to the momentum effect, Xserver (originally designed for mainframes and actual terminal interfaces with them) has been used on Linux since, well, the beginning. That’s fine and all, I mean whatever it works. The issue arrises where now people have hardware which was built in the last 20 years claiming to be “modern”. Or maybe you want to watch a movie on your computer without tons of screen tearing caused by whatever protocol was written for plain text to work over the 1080s network Xserver is hoping for.
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Hyprland Managin’ dem Windoz I’ve written about the Wayland thing before, here I’m just talkin’ about my Hyprland configuration so it can be replicated later. I’ve tried to keep this as simple as possible without a ton of extra utilities and what have you as it becomes rather difficult to manage the fancier you make it. You can do on the fly color scheme matching to dynamic wallpapers in animated menus from quick access bars and stuff ya ya great but I’m just gonna stick to what works.
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NixOS Setup for the Everyday Thinkpad’er Hoping to sort of break down my configuration.nix here a bit as it’ll be easier to reference later and will maybe explain a few options I use which could be helpful for others if anyone ever sees this!
Basic Setup This section comes a lot from the default configuration. It defines things like yes use systemD, sets a host name so your computer knows who you are, timezeone, and makes a user which is useful. No having to set that up and groups after the fact. The other crucial aspect here is networkmanager is enabled and setup in this step. You can then by default use nmtui or the strange CLI interface. What I’ve done is added dmenu_networkmanager or whatever and mapped it to SUPER+N so I can just quick whip that opened to do WiFi stuff. It works without issue in conjunction with networkmanager.
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Starting Off Today was the day I decided. I had the time, the local version of the site is pretty much ready, and really nothing was holding me back. I am glad I’ve now done as test the entire process of hosting the Karma site I’ve been building with Hugo. I learned a lot and now because the site is essentially live it should be real easy to switch like 3 things over and bam, waboom done deal the site is migrated.
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Wordpress We started the blog back when we started sailing, the one over at www.sv-karma.com. It seemed like a logical choice because its “easy to use” and its not too expensive. It’s fine, it works. The multitude of buttons seemed nice but it is actually sorta limiting as soon as you try and do something that isn’t obvious. We are happy with the site when you visit it, but working on it is sort of a pain.
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Ah yes, makin’ Documents I feel like this is sort of a contentious thing when people are initially talking about switching to Linux. Everyone, well maybe more used to, use Microsoft Word for one reason or another. You were taught it, the format is pretty widely accepted, you don’t know there were any other options out there, yada yada and so one. When switching then this is immediatly an issue as Microsoft Word doesn’t run on Linux.
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Software Setup for the Mid 2020s Here we are 5 years later and I have changed a number of things from the previous information on this topic. Whilst the fundemanetals are still the same, I’m now on my computer a lot less as we sail full time but I still like tinkering around on occasion. The other thing is now we are away from service and the interwebs a lot more so I want this stuff to just work without my having to fiddle with new programs and stuff as I can’t do that without the internet lol.
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I am NOT a Linux Admin! Okay no, definitely not. But this is a big step in the right direction of having any semblance of an idea what’s going on when I try and fiddle with this stuff. So here is roughly what has happened and why I’m now relativley stoked on this.
The Idea So I’ve had this domain and a super simple HTML site only for a while now. It worked but the issue was it was all done totally manually so it was pretty annoying to keep the pages consistant as if I changed the header on one I had to do it to all of them. Obviously this is a solved problem, just not by me.
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