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!
Intro This is not my work, it’s the introduction to a larger, but not too much larger, paper on the differences in design between Single Ended Triode amps and PushPull amps. I always thought it was funny and I have lost the document once or twice so I wanted to put the initial part here so it’d be easy to find again. Plus I saved the actual file here on the server for you to download if you’d like.
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How'd We Get Here Emacs oh emacs it has such a reputation. Also it's an interesting one because really I don't think its explained too well. It's so often directly compared to Vim as the other long running option for an extensible text editor but then you open it and it's sorta hard to grasp what is actually goin' on? I've watched enough videos now of people talking about it and I think now I actually sort of get the mindset and idea behind it enough to give it a whirl. ...
MangoWCurious So since I got back on the window manager game I’ve been on Hyprland as it was super easy to install, works pretty much right out of the box, and the pain points of how to get some system things like Wifi and brightness control working are something which I’ve become familiar with.
Wayland having a compositor as part of the way it works is sweet because things like blur and animations (gol don’t like these but they’re a good example) work as defined in the Hyprland configuration files as opposed to a separate program running to render those things in X Server.
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20 Years?! This is bad, it’s actually over 20 years now I think and I’m not even that old actually, 29 at the time of writing this. That’s a long time to have tinkered with Linux. I’ve essentially grown up with it now. These tools and I have come to maturity (or lack there of) together through the years and I think it’s interesting now looking at the state of the actual tools themselves as well as, lets say the ‘community’, around this grouping of utilities we have come to know and love as Linux, or actually GNU/Linux, today.
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Typing Oh yes, I love it, you love it, we all do it, I have been a strong believer in that the things we use every day should be the ones you spend time learning about or looking into quality examples of. The modern world has us typing every day to some degree or another and so it only makes sense that you and I would have different and strong opinions about the tools we use to do said aforementioned typing. Out of all the computer related rabbit holes one can get sucked into, the tool you use to interact with your computer in the first place, the keyboard, seems like the most obvious one for the normal “I don’t care about computers I just use one” crowd to get at least semi interested in.
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The Rain is a Vibe Seattle is a strangely in tune with Hifi sort of town actually. It’s not immediatly obvious but once you start looking around with a bit more specificity than “speakers” or “stereo” you slowly find more and more people interested in bispoke and niche Hifi gear. I don’t think there are many other places in the US with such a high density of places where you can go listen to one off speakers/amps and the like!
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This why flakes start to shine! Initially I had this section at the end, but in this case putting the conclusion at the beginning here might help motivate someone to try this for themselves. The crux of the situation is that the flake.nix file defines the package versions and ‘channels’ so to speak. It’s like a level higher than the configuration.nix. You import your configuration.nix as a module into the flake. Now you can rebuild –flake and that means 1. you don’t have to switch channels first to get the same options as I have defined and 2. all the versions of stuff are exactly exactly the same, meaning once you switch into what you’ve built it will match the last time the repo was written without any doubt.
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Word Processing? A classic predicament. Using MS Word or Google Docs is painfully slow, requires internet, and all your sensitive information along with your family’s is sent off to American mega corporations. Alas, but what else can one do?
I’ve written about this before generally as far as making documents with Vim, here I’m hoping to keep track of the practical tips, tricks, and settings/plugins which add to the experience of using ViM as primarily a writing tool. Generally, at least for me, how typing things out usually goes is:
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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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