~elis/blog/ on Elis Hirwing

Computing contrast colors without dart-sass

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0200

Back in 2021 I wrote about dynamic CSS color themes with similar contrasts, where I used a SCSS function to automatically adjust colors to meet the WCAG 7:1 contrast ratio against both a light and a dark background. The idea was that you specify the intent — the hue you want — and the build system derives the actual color that achieves sufficient contrast.

That worked well, but it required dart-sass. Hugo’s built-in LibSass was removed in Hugo 0.128, leaving dart-sass as the only SCSS transpiler. Getting dart-sass into the Nix build required a symlinkJoin bundle that wrapped Hugo with dart-sass on its PATH — not terrible, but an extra moving part in both devshell.nix and packages/default.nix.

NixOS ❄: Remote unlock of encrypted ZFS over SSH

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0200

This is a follow-up to my earlier post: Encrypted ZFS mirror with mirrored boot on NixOS.

At the end of that post I briefly mentioned that I configured remote unlocking of my encrypted ZFS pools over SSH on boot, linking off to the NixOS wiki. The wiki page is now quite outdated and the approach it describes no longer works well with modern NixOS, which uses a systemd-based initrd by default. This post covers the current way to do it.

My experience of migrating from Google G-Suite to ProtonMail

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:40:00 +0100

For about 9 years, I’ve been a customer of Google G-Suite, using it for email, file storage, and photos. I’ve never fully trusted them, however I have always claimed the following.

As a paying customer, I hope that they mine my data less than they do for free users.

There’s a lot of uncertainty in that sentence. Words like hope and less aren’t exactly reassuring, and there’s no proof it’s actually the case either. With a recent price increase warning at renewal time and the current state of politics between the EU and USA, I decided to switch to an EU provider.

Migrating from ZFS mirror to RAIDZ2

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 20:00:00 +0200

For a long time I’ve been running my storage on a 2-disk ZFS mirror. It’s been stable, safe, and easy to manage. However, at some point, 2 disks just aren’t enough, and I wanted to upgrade to RAIDZ2 so that I could survive up to two simultaneous disk failures.

I could have added another mirror, which would have been simple, and this setup would allow two drives to fail, but not any two drives. I wanted the extra safety of being able to lose any two drives.

Elis Tempeh v1.0

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 13:20:00 +0100

Tempeh. Ever heard of it? It’s a traditional Indonesian food made from fermented soybeans. Packed with protein and a unique nutty flavor, tempeh is a fantastic meat substitute for vegans and vegetarians alike.

In this post, I’ll guide you through what tempeh is, how to make it at home, and tackle some of the common challenges, like maintaining the right fermentation temperature. So, if you’ve ever thought about giving tempeh-making a try, let’s dive in!

Back from Hyprland to Sway

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 21:30:00 +0200

After a brief experiment with Hyprland, I’m back to using Sway. My experiment lasted less than a month, as I hoped Hyprland’s window selector would resolve my window-sharing woes.

It turns out it wasn’t, because the first week back at work I had the need to share a slideshow in full screen. Then it doesn’t matter if you can select a window anymore. So my workarounds with Sway would have worked in that use case while my Hyprland set up… didn’t.

Switching from Sway to Hyprland

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 16:40:00 +0200

Introduction

After four years with Sway, I’ve decided to transition to Hyprland. My journey from EXWM to Sway began about four years ago, and I documented the experience in this post three years ago. While Sway has served me well, it has its limitations that I’ve used hacks and workarounds to circumvent.

The Limitations of Sway

One major drawback of Sway is its screen sharing capabilities. Although I managed to get screen sharing somewhat functional, it only allows sharing the full screen.

Prune gh-pages branches using GitHub Actions

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 11:30:00 +0200

This website is hosted on GitHub Pages, built using nix and hugo with a custom theme that I maintain. I have automated updates for the nix flake to get new versions of hugo and nixpkgs, which applies to both my theme and the website itself.

This automation generates numerous commits and deployments to the gh-pages branch, mainly due to minor version bumps of hugo and other changes to the theme. While this hasn’t been a problem for my static website, which primarily consists of text, a recent addition has created some challenges.

NixOS superpower: specialisations

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 20:30:00 +0100

NixOS has a lot of configurability and features. One feature that I’ve known about for a while that I think is both really cool, but also a bit lesser known is the ability to have declarative Specialisations. To me, this is a superpower of NixOS that I have a hard time to see any other Linux Distribution having.

What’s a Specialisation?

The name doesn’t do it justice, it’s a bit of a weird name for it. However I couldn’t come up with a better name for it either.

A personal adventure with hot beverages

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 22:30:00 +0100

My history with coffee

I’ve never been into coffee, every time I’ve tried them as a child or young adult they have been terrible. They have just been bitter and it’s not a taste profile I to this day enjoy at all.

I have, a couple of times encountered coffee that friends have made that actually weren’t that bitter. So my reaction to it has managed to reach the level of “this isn’t terrible”. Not terrible isn’t a great review though, not really something that one gets back to right away.

AI should be trained with vegan values

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 19:00:00 +0100

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, concerns have been raised about the potential dangers of AI becoming too powerful and taking over human civilization. In a recent interview, entrepreneur and CEO Elon Musk expressed his concerns about the risks associated with developing super-intelligent AI. However, his views were challenged by Larry Page, co-founder of Google, who referred to Musk as a “speciesist” for not wanting AI to become a “digital god”.

Outsourcing NixOS compile time to Microsoft

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 20:00:00 +0100

NixOS is a Linux-distribution that may be source-based, but it has a binary cache that covers things so you generally don’t need to compile things, things tends to be cached.

However, depending on how you configure your system, you may trigger compiles depending on what you do.

So a thing I do is that I run Emacs 29 with the native-comp patches that is wayland native with the pgtk-branch. This is by no mean the stable Emacs release at the point of writing. So to get this Emacs I use the excellent nix-community/emacs-overlay (that is maintained by my friend @adisbladis). However, this means that I will get Emacs from a development branch of Emacs, then I need to build all the Emacs packages that I use in my configuration as well for this version of Emacs.

Keeping LG webOS Developer Mode alive with Home Assistant

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 20:00:00 +0100

For over 10 years I’ve used Kodi on a separate PC connected to a TV to play back local media.

A couple of weeks ago everything changed in a matter of days. I listened to Late Night Linux – Episode 179 where they talked about Jellyfin. I have looked into Jellyfin before, however I’ve disregarded it due to the lack of app for LG webOS. This changed because the podcast episode told that there was a webOS app for Jellyfin.

First impressions of Purism Librem 5

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 23:40:00 +0100

Back in 2017, this fairly small company Purism launched a crowdfunding on their own crowdfunding platform for their future phone known as Librem 5. I went back and forth a bit, I thought through some of the history about the company and decided that I thought they may deliver some day. At least I wanted to support the effort to make a modern Linux that could fill the hole that the demise of the Nokia N900 with no worthy device following up.

Dynamic CSS color themes with similar contrasts

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 21:10:00 +0100

This blog is built with Emacs, SCSS using Nix and deployed as static files to GitHub Pages. This blog also has quite some colors due to the syntax highlighting for code that is performed using CSS rules on HTML classes.

So in total I have 15 different colors defined, in which four of them is background and foreground colors, two of them is related to link and visited link colors. Then I have nine colors remaining which are related to syntax highlighting of code.

Mobile org-mode use with Orgzly and Syncthing

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 21:30:00 +0100

I’ve been an Emacs user for 13+ years, during this time I’ve been using org-mode on and off for different thing.

Some examples where I currently use org-mode:

Deployment of this website
Making of presentation slides
Project read me files
Notes files
Time reporting

I’ve tried to use it for to do’s but never really managed, partly because I wanted to have a good interface for my to do’s on my phone. Then I wanted quick synchronization to my computers to be able to pick up the changes there.

Simple deployments of NixOS machines with nixus

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 16:30:00 +0100

Since I’ve started using NixOS about four years ago I haven’t really used any tools to do central deployments of machines. But I’ve always read and known that NixOS is excellent at this. NixOS can easily build another systems configuration, then copy the system to the target systems nix store and then activate it there.

Despite knowing all this, I haven’t gotten around to doing this centrally. A while ago the need for this changed because one of my VPSes started running low on RAM, low enough to not be able to build new generations of it’s own system. Which posed a problem for future upgrades. One way to solve it would be to pay more money for resources that aren’t really needed except from when doing system upgrades. The other way would be to push pre-built systems from another location. Using the second way is simpler and fixes the issue.

NixOS: Setting up Push To Talk in Mumble on Sway

Sat, 26 Jun 2021 22:40:00 +0100

Switching to Wayland has it’s side-effects, one of which is the improved security from X11 where applications can’t just randomly spy on each other at any point.

This is both good news and bad news.

The good news:

Applications can’t just randomly spy on each other.

The bad news:

Things like global hot-keys in for example Mumble won’t work.

Back from complaining to actually solving the problem though.

Mumble does have a patch for a future release

So there’s the issue about Push to talk does not work in Wayland, this has been followed up by a patch Add DBus calls to de/-activate push to talk. This patch will land in the 1.4.0 release though while current stable is 1.3.4.

The day when ZFS saved my data

Fri, 21 May 2021 20:45:00 +0100

Today my work day didn’t turn out the way I expected. It started like a normal day, I woke up around the regular time, did my morning routine, sat at my desk and started my work-issued laptop.

It booted up just fine, I connected it to my Ultrawide display, started going through Slack and Email and catch up on some news while drinking my morning tea and waking up.

Then after around an hour of work things started to hang up, most notably Firefox totally froze up. I could launch a new terminal but not start htop, I had a htop session in a terminal already because it’s part of what I usually have running. So I went there to look.

Detailed setup of screen sharing in Wayland (Sway)

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 23:00:00 +0100

Getting screen sharing to work on Wayland seems to be surprisingly hard. Maybe it is compared to X11 that doesn’t require any additional setup at all.

To have working screen sharing on Sway you really need three components installed and set up with correct environment variables.

These three components are:

pipewire (I have version: 0.3.21)
xdg-desktop-portal (I have version: 1.8.0)
xdg-desktop-portal-wlr (I have version: 0.1.0)

These three components has to have systemd user services. You should be able to see them in the list if you run systemctl --user, just look for the different programs name ending in .service.

Switching to Wayland (Sway)

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 22:00:00 +0100

Like every other desktop Linux user for the past many years I’ve used X11. I was on i3wm for quite some time until I was introduced to Emacs X11 Window Manager which I used exclusively for about 18 months, I’ve even held a talk about it. But at some point it got too annoying, for example in multi monitor use cases.

At this point my first step was to go back to set up i3wm again. With that set up I wanted to give SwayWM another attempt, it was years ago I’ve checked it out before. I think my previous experience was when the project was new. At that point (if I remember correctly), not even the window decorations looked like the ones in i3wm.

Ultra wide monitor

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 21:15:00 +0100

A couple of months (after at least half a year of thinking) I finally decided to do it. I decided to buy a Ultra wide screen for my home office. The one I had been looking at for months is the Samsung Odyssey G9 C49G95. It happens to be the opposite of cheap. Part of the triggering factor was a conversation on IRC in #nixos-chat where a person admitted that she had one of those. Then the real trigger to buy it was to find it at 23% discount. It was a return item to a store.

I find food habits at Free Software events weird

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 21:30:00 +0100

This is a follow-up on: Why I use Free Software, Why I got into Veganism.

Since the Free Software movement in it’s core is an ethical movement, which cares about human rights and humans access and ability to study, share and improve on the software they use. I’m well aware that not everyone in the Free Software community is in it for ethical reasons - but I’m pretty sure that there’s enough of us that care about ethics for this to be important.

Why I got into Veganism

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 21:00:00 +0100

This is a follow-up on: Why I use Free Software. This has been followed up by: I find food habits at Free Software events weird.

People who turn to Veganism can do this for different reasons, some do it for health reasons, others for climate reasons. But in it’s core, the Vegan movement in itself is an ethical movement about saving the animals. The other reasons are more or less side effects.

Why I use Free Software

Sat, 16 Jan 2021 23:30:00 +0100

This has been followed up by: Why I got into Veganism, I find food habits at Free Software events weird.

People in general may have different reasons for choosing to use Free Software, some may use it for the price, others because of pragmatic reasons, simply put it’s the best tool for the job. Others may choose it for ethical reasons.

I didn’t get into Free Software for any of the said reasons above, I got into Free Software because it seemed different and fun. The free price point is what made it possible for me as a teenager to play around with it as I did.

Weechat Android SSH relay setup

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 18:00:00 +0100

Setting up the Weechat Android GitHub Play Store

relay client over SSH can be a bit tricky and quite bad at giving useful error messages. So since I’m going through a re-setup of that I’m also writing down my notes here.

Weechat configuration

Type the following commands into Weechat.

Placeholders such as {port} and {password} will be used here and later on. Suggested default port is 9000, but you need to chose something unique on your system. This is especially important if you have a multi user system. Setting a {password} is also especially important if you have a multi user system.

My battle with wrist pains

Sun, 09 Aug 2020 18:00:00 +0100

Note: I’m not a doctor, dietitian or ergonomics expert. I just have spent a lot of time to find something that works well for me. This is my experience and you can probably take inspiration for it, but don’t do stupid things and seek expert advice if you need it.

In parts of the IT industry abbreviations like RSI and CTS gets thrown around fairly often. I’m guilty myself of doing this.

NixOS ❄: tmpfs as home

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 22:30:00 +0100

This is a follow-up post for my earlier post: NixOS ❄: tmpfs as root.

When you start to go down the route of setting up a “pure” system that is as clean as you want it to be on each boot. You may start with the lazy route of using a persistent partition for your home directory. But it never feels quite right. But initially it’s so convenient to choose this path.

NixOS ❄: tmpfs as root

Sat, 02 May 2020 10:00:00 +0100

This post covers both EFI and legacy boot setups.

One fairly unique property of NixOS is the ability to boot with only /boot and /nix. Nothing else is actually required. This supports doing all sorts of weird things with your root file system.

One way is to do like Graham’s post “erase your darlings” describes and empty your root file system each boot using ZFS snapshots. This way have some cool things that you could do on top of his setup, such as doing snapshots when it’s running and roll-back to empty on boot. That way you actually can go back to recover files you lost but still have an empty state.

PHP packaging in NixOS ❄

Sun, 05 Apr 2020 20:00:00 +0200

This is a sneak peak into the future 20.09 release of NixOS.

The PHP packaging ecosystem in NixOS has been in a quite sad state for a long time. Partly because of the lack of people caring about PHP in Nix, but also that PHP is a bit weird when it comes to packaging.

State of PHP before NixOS 20.09

Due to the lack of ability to do clever things like the python community does with =withPackages= to compose a package with the dependencies you need we have defaulted to provide a huge default package to accommodate all needs.

Double stitched Penguin Beanie

Sat, 08 Feb 2020 17:00:00 +0100

This is a quite unusual post for this blog, it’s not what I’ve expected to put on here. But I wanted to share it somewhere more permanent than many other places where I hang out on the internet. So here it goes.

I’ve been knitting for a bunch of years now, and some years ago I was intrigued by a knitting method that is called double knitting. In theory it’s fairly simple because you basically make two knitting’s at the same time in parallel and mirror the pattern.

Encrypted ZFS mirror with mirrored boot on NixOS

Sun, 04 Aug 2019 10:20:00 +0200

So for a long time I have wanted to replace my file server, because it’s an old HP Microserver that is really slow. And at the same time I have had this beast of a desktop tower PC that I haven’t used with a Xeon and 32GiB ECC memory that has just been turned off due to noise. The obvious solution is to re-purpose that install and move it to a location where noise doesn’t matter, e.g. the closet (a.k.a the server room) where the file server lives.

Hello World!

Sat, 08 Jun 2019 20:10:00 +0100

Hello world! This is a test blog post.

This is an external link example.org. Internal link start page.

This is a block quote element.

This is an inline code block.

Test of syntax highlighting

elisp

;; Define the hello function
(defun hello ()
 "This
 is my
 docstring"
 (message "world"))

;; Call the hello function
(hello)

Nix

{
 # Define the hello function
 hello = {}: "world";

 # More tests
 boolean = true;
 fileimport = import ./src/file.nix;

 # Call the hello function
 message = hello {};
}

Go

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
 fmt.Println("Hello world")
}

PHP

<?php
# Define the hello function
function hello() : void {
 echo "world";
}

// Call the hello function
hello();

Sample text

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Tempor orci dapibus ultrices in iaculis nunc sed augue lacus. Donec ac odio tempor orci dapibus ultrices in. Faucibus vitae aliquet nec ullamcorper sit amet risus. Pulvinar sapien et ligula ullamcorper malesuada proin libero. Magna sit amet purus gravida quis blandit turpis cursus in. Elit ullamcorper dignissim cras tincidunt lobortis feugiat vivamus at augue. Ut morbi tincidunt augue interdum. Enim ut tellus elementum sagittis vitae et. At augue eget arcu dictum varius duis.