My "production stuff":
- https://github.com/festivus-es/festivus - public holidays calendars for Spanish cities
- https://github.com/remote-es/remotes - companies hiring in Spain for remote positions
Usable WIPs:
- https://alexpdp7.github.io/selfhostwatch/ - track self-hosting package updates (such as YunoHost)
- https://github.com/alexpdp7/ubpkg/ - package manager for "upstream binaries"
- https://github.com/alexpdp7/termflux - Miniflux terminal client
IncusOS lifted three weeks ago the main limitation I found in my initial exploration: the first ZFS pool can only use one drive, which made using the cheapest Hetzner servers a pain.
It is still limited compared to Proxmox; Proxmox claims to handle any drive failure easily, IncusOS recovers easily from failure of the "B" drive, but if the "A" drive fails, you need to install IncusOS to the new "A" drive.
Incus is amazing and I'm seriously considering IncusOS for my next iteration.
I started up Zoom this morning and it gave me the message
"It looks like we are unable to connect. Please check your network connection and try again."
But my network connection was fine. The problem was at Zoom's end, or more precisely, Cloudflare's. (And it seems OK now.)
I'm beginning to be annoyed by this reflexive "please check _your_ network connection" coda in these messages. What it is, is victim blaming. And possibly gaslighting too. _Their_ network connection went wrong, and their immediate response is to tell all of us users that _we_ must have done something wrong. It makes us all do lots of pointless work checking things that don't need checking, and it probably makes half of us feel inadequate when we can't find any problem.
If you're _going_ to advise users to check their own network connection, take reasonable steps first to ensure the problem really does look like being at the local end. Try pinging a few other independently run well-known sites; try some DNS lookups; if you can't do _anything_, suggest the user checks their connection, but if the rest of that stuff works and only your own server can't be reached, maybe redirect to your application's status webpage instead?
Sweet next year letsencrypt will support a persisting DNS record so these tools don’t need access to DNS for renewal
„The features matter a lot less than the people who are using the platform. […]
It can sometimes be a bit misleading when you get a lot of ideas and feature requests in a community, and the conversations become, ‘We definitely need feature X to grow because that’s what’s stopping people from using the platform.‘ While that’s true in some cases, the sad reality is that any flaw can be overlooked as long as the people you want to reach are there.“
This feels true for #Conversations_im as well.
Even more insidious: LLM editing & "vibe coding" is itself gatekeeping! 100%!
It's telling people they're too weak-minded to learn how to program and accomplish meaningful work using their own brains, so they need Big Tech to (expensively) do it for them! In addition, it means Fancy Clever 10X Programmers (lol) can *avoid* making programming a whole hell of a lot easier because that notion "doesn't matter" anymore!
It's all so completely backwards and absurd! @sue https://glasgow.social/@sue/115633253930152970
Hello, computer.
Leonard Nimoy's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (aka The One With the Whales!) was released 39 years ago today.
One of the most popular Trek films, the Whale Movie is indeed one of my fav. Fresh, funny, with a fine environmental message, it completes an overall successful trilogy.
I use Python mostly because it doesn't get in my way nor bothers me rather than because I like it.
I use Rust mostly because I like it, although it tends to get in my way and bother me.
Django's built-in admin is powerful, but it's essentially a separate framework within Django. After attempting to modernize django-admin2, I realized we needed a fresh approach: an admin interface that works like the rest of Django, built on generic CBVs, plugins, and view factories. Meet Django Admin Deux: a proof-of-concept admin where CRUD operations are just actions, knowledge transfers both ways, and everything feels like Django.
https://emma.has-a.blog/articles/django-admin-deux-bringing-admin-back-to-django.html
Here's a thing I wrote last month: jwzsheet.
It is a small and self-contained PHP and JavaScript library for generating HTML tables of spreadsheet-like reports, including arithmetically-computed cell values.
"I am not going to write a spreadsheet", I kept saying to myself, "that's stupid."
"Ok, maybe just a little bit of a spreadsheet. This far no farther."
"Ok, maybe just a little bit more."
As the song says, "I tell myself I will not go, even as a drive there."
Very excited to announce the general availability of #IncusOS today, an immutable OS image specifically designed to run #Incus!
https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/announcing-incusos/25139
At work, I set up some development things with Docker because I suspected a few components would not support Podman.
I removed one of those components recently, so today I decided to test using Podman.
I had to activate the Podman socket (not a fan), but mostly everything worked; just needed small patches and documentation.
And this solved a few problems automatically!
I think we overuse containers, so try to make things work without containers. But if you need them, try Podman first.
LB: it's amazing how much worse the experience of watching movies, TV, and anime is now than bootleg *.mkvs circa 2008. Pause buttons are laggy on most streaming service players, if they work at all, audio cuts in and out when pausing and unpausing, OSDs take up giant portions of the player window, good luck not accidentally hitting "skip intro" or "skip credits," and then this shit with subtitles.
Typst 0.14 is out now! Get ready for production with accessibility, PDFs as images, character-level justification, and more. Learn about more of the highlights in Typst 0.14 in the thread below ⤵️
Does anybody else ever think about how "wow, that person is REALLY smart, they are my go-to for tough questions" used to mean knowing lots of stuff in your actual head, whereas now it mostly means you're better at search engines than most people you know?
I think about that rather a lot.
I think containers tend to be used in very debatable ways for self hosting. But playing with Podman quadlets, they seem pretty proper- they integrate cleanly with the system, they have built-in support for automatic image updates...
I still prefer not using containers, but some stuff like Vaultwarden the container is the first-class citizen distribution system.
Infra-as-code example at:
My WezTerm saga continues with having to adopt the Kitty keyboard protocol on Emacs and having to patch stuff to fix some problems. But now I can use Super on Emacs!
But then Kitty keyboard protocol broke Senpai. Asked on IRC and they committed a fix real quick! (But then it broke stuff for other people :(
Three weeks on WezTerm and one of my remaining issues was not being able to press ¿ in Emacs. Activated the Kitty keyboard protocol and installed kkp in Emacs and problem fixed and... now I can use the "super" (Windows key) modifier without interfering with Gnome.
I am still uneasy at how far I'm deviating from defaults and always-installed software, but OTOH, I'm happy.
(I still reach for the mouse, but I'm doing a good amount of keyboard copying and pasting in the shell!)
ForgeFed seems to be far away still, but apparently Forgejo is making some progress there.
Although I played last week with Gitweb and its RSS feeds. Maybe that is all we need?
#Forgejo 13.0.0 was just released!
A new moderation tool is available to report inappropriate user behavior or content that should be looked at by instance administrators. Two factor authentication (TOTP, etc.) can be enforced on the entire instance for all users or instance administrators. Forgejo Actions usability was improved with static checking of workflow files and access to the logs of all run attempts.
Check out the blog post at https://forgejo.org/2025-10-release-v13-0/
Another gem from Hillel:
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/we-are-not-special/
Part two of three comparing software engineering to other engineering disciplines. Mostly dispelling myths about "real engineering" that us software people often have, but also highlighting some differences, etc.
Straight into my list of interesting articles.
Also "We are not special" is a great title.
I believe declarative Linux distributions to be the future. I find GNU Guix very interesting, but it's adherence to free software means most wireless networking is unsupported.
Nonguix adds the necessary proprietary firmware and drivers, but still I required handholding and effort to get it to work on my experimentation laptop.
So trying to get Nonguix to have clearer instructions:
I won't use @tailscale for personal things, but work is different. Been doing a proof of concept with it (with AWS EKS), and it's nearly as good as the hype!
I have some experience with setting up VPNs, and definitely Tailscale has the smoothest setup I've seen and it works out of the box.
Only small nags:
- Kubernetes egress seems undesirably complex.
- Didn't figure out how to configure tags using Terraform.
- Not a fan that each Kubernetes ingress counts as a device.
A few days on WezTerm by @wez and I'm very happy.
ctrl+shift+space to copy URLs works quite well. Sometimes I still copy with the mouse instead of using ctrl+shift+x, but I'm getting better.
Multiplexing integrated into the terminal is very nice!
Also I didn't know it did predictive local echo. Sometimes it's distracting, but sometimes it really helps!
I think Gnome Terminal is fantastic, but I'm kinda happy to have dared to experiment!
MS Teams has a really nice feature (that is probably an antitrust problem) where you can present a PowerPoint deck directly using the JavaScript version of PowerPoint. The slide deck is popped into Sharepoint, you get the presenter view and everyone else gets the slides. The slides are rendered locally, so they're scaled properly to your display and all of the accessibility features work.
And this is exposed in the UI in two ways. In the 'share' tray, you can select PowerPoint presentations instead of screens or windows, and you get this view. In PowerPoint, there's a huge 'Present in Teams' button right next to the share button.
And yet, 90% of meetings I'm in where people present PowerPoint slides over Teams, they don't use this. And that was even true when I worked at Microsoft.
I honestly don't know how you'd make this more discoverable.
So now I have a lot more sympathy with the MS Office team's problem that 90% of the feature requests that they get are for things that have already shipped.
I love the fact that modern browsers have a button I can press that works out what the page would have looked like if it were designed to be viewed in Nescape 1.0 and renders it like that ('reader mode'). The fact that there is mainstream tooling to undo all of the work that people put into making something annoying is a microcosm of the tech industry.