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!
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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Site Rebuild So here we are, maybe it’s time I try and use something slightly more complicated than just making extra simple HTML templates and copy and pasting them around to make a site. This is a test rebuild of the old site but using Hugo and some random theme I found on the interwebs.
Thusfar it seems to be working alright, but there is definitely a bit of a learning curve.
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The Problem Vim, ah it’s so lovely. Can’t say enough good things and it’ll go on forever so I won’t. Bad things though? Yes, definitely. The main one being you find yourself pressing 4 keys and you realize there is probably some danq built in shiz you could do which would do that automatically through the whole file, fixing your spelling mistakes on yesterday’s, and organizing the indentations on your neighbour’s thesis. The problem is this is so common that it’s impossible to remember all the neat tricks you’ve found that are built in. To help rectify this, I’m just going to keep a running list of random things I come across which are useful in my usecases. Just to get started, use ZZ to write and quit and ZQ to :q!
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Collection of Custom Unix Setups From Over the Years Throughout the years, I have come across a lot of different screenshots of people's tailored desktops/themes/setups/whatever and I have collected a few. Below are some highlights of completely random desktops from strangers I do not know that I happened to like at the time of me both saving the picture and putting it here.
Please take note, as these are not mine, I am not involved in anything that may be on their computers. I have simply saved the ones that are neatly riced.
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Linux And How I Got Here As you may have noticed, this site is a lot about GNU/Linux and is even hosted on such an operating system as it is something that is very interesting to me and I rather enjoy learning about and using Linux as a tool. Here we are going to be looking at how I got here and some of the reasons I think you should be here to.
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