~elis/blog/

Switching to Wayland (Sway)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ❄

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.