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!
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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How this site works This site is hosted on a freestanding full Debian based server somewhere out there in the ether. I pay I think 2.50 FreedomDollars a month for this and really it is just a straight up computer with a static IP that I can use for whatever. While you see this site, there may or may not be other private services I am running here, who knows! I think the other main use I am looking forward to using it is hosting and seeding everyone's favourite Linux IOSs ;)
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XMonad Dotfiles Welcome to the page where I will keep track of my current dotfiles! Currently we are working with XMonad and are continually updating the corresponding GitHub repo to ensure that the setup is reproducible. You can find the repo to clone these yourself which should do about 90% of the setup by itself. This is some XMonad on some ThinkPad.
Installation & Details This is where things need to be improved. You can of course still copy or use these configs, though the install process is pretty diy.
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This is the page to see the hardware that makes the magic that is this site happen, as well as other goofing off activities. The Computer Honestly, what did you expect here, of course its a GNU/ThinkPad. These things are just the best. I flirted with other laptops for over a year here recently after having a first generation ThinkPad X1 Carbon for like 5 years. That thing was put through the ringer. It had more than 10 probably pints of beer poured right on it, was definitely dropped off of tables a few times, it even spent some time entirely underwater! This was the computer I had in my backpack for over a year of hitchiking and tossing that pack into the back of pickups all over the world.
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NixOS You have just fumbled your Arch install again, tried to sudo pacman -Rns some font you weren’t using, and you removed font manager, or did any of the following and its time again to begin the Arch insta… STOP! There is another way! If you’re here, you are one for dotfiles. You might not think so, but I can see it in you. What if I told you, you could essentially dotfile your machine, with the continual ability to switch between changes on the fly, even those pesky ones that removed audio support or deleted grub’s ability to boot your OS.
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AwesomeWM Oh do you remember AwesomeWM? I barely do. This is more than 10 years old at this point but I’m putting it down here to keep it around as it was interesting at some point. Most of this probably doesn’t work anymore, I don’t even know if AwesomeWM is maintained?
Please note that this page is somewhat depricated and is really the original write of the NixOS page on this site. I have since stopped using AwesomeWM and I have this page here for nostalgia and really nothing else. This config can be installed on your system if you just clone the repo and put the awesome folder in your ~/.config/ but it'll work on any OS. All the Nix stuff please ignore and go to either Xmonad or NixOS pages. ...