Linux

I’ve been struggling to get org-caldav working on the desktop. Nothing to do with the program itself. It’s excellent, fairly intuitive and really well documented. There just seems to be some gremlin in the works, that does not let the darned calendar see my org files.1 Will keep at it. What this note is for however, was the pleasant realisation that Emacs can transparently work with gpg encrypted files.2 I wanted to keep my calendar user/password credentials in a file, because the to and fro between my Baikal caldav server was generating too many requests for my password....

I use Miniflux as my feed reader, and I love it to bits. It does what I need, it does it fast and it stays out of the way. Well, almost. I have a couple of those—whatchacalit—firehose feeds. And I keep skimming through them by clicking next, next, next on each page. Like so, Except for when there is no next under my pointer. It’d happen quite frequently and I’d have to keep moving my mouse to find the link....

Ok, here’s to learning Kubernetes in earnest, to get that career pivot going. Notes as I learn, over the coming days. This one, is a lot of random thoughts on bringing up a cluster. It is both harder than you think, and easier than you think I did this, because I wanted to run my own cluster, just like the big boys do.1 It’s much easier to run alternatives like kind, if that suits your needs better....

I wanted to start learning Kubernetes. So I thought I’d spin up a Ubuntu VM to use as my sacrificial guinea pig. While the normal NAT mode works well enough for most of my networking needs, I wanted the Ubuntu VM to show up and work as a machine on my host’s network.1 I have two network cards on my desktop and wanted to allocate one of them to this VM....

Every now and then, I spin up a fresh vm. And being a creature of habit, I use the same username on my play / experimental vms as my normal login. So everytime I try to login to such a vm or pi, I get a Too many authentication failures error. So to just get in and start working, I need to tell ssh to ignore my keys and try using passwords as the authentication mechanism....

Writing this down, so that I will not struggle the next time1, I have to do this. I use Valkyrie for everything on the blog in various weights, except for code and preformatted stuff, which uses Source Code Pro Medium. Both are WOFF2 fonts. Anything in Hugo’s assets/css/extended folder will be picked up by Hugo and bundled into a single CSS file. The fonts are in subdirectories in the static/fonts/font-name folder....

I’ve been sticking to plain old rsync -az to sling files around using Rsync. Until I ran into a hiccough today, where I filled up my teensy remote storage on the Pi, because a couple of subdirectories that were part of the run, were hundreds of megabytes large.1 So I did the usual, did hunt around the web thing, and learnt about --exclude So now the new Rsync command is …...

I often fat fingered the file name / buffer name / Org Roam link name when launching something new. And then when I am busy and knee deep in work, I glance up to see the error glaring at me. I figured out, looked up how to fix it Hit C-x d to flip into a dired buffer Find my filename in the list. (C-s can help search and narrow stuff) Then C-x C-q to go into Wdired mode Change the file name to whatever I want it to C-c C-c to be done with it....

More diving into Org Mode and Emacs. I have a stuff-to-do.org file, that serves as an inbox for most long term tasks that I want to tackle. Stuff that needs doing, books that I want to buy, books that I want to read, courses that I want to learn, movies or tv shows that I want to watch, stuff on the web that I want to catchup on, etc. etc. etc....

(Update, 2024-03-15: I now use lego. will update this post later.) After struggling to renew my certs for the third time in a row, hopefully these pointers should keep me on track for the next time. Namecheap does not yet support automatic wildcard renewal for the Letsencrypt/Certbot combo. Check next year. Have your Namecheap control panel open and ready. Switch to root or run the command below with sudo Command to renew: certbot certonly --manual --manual-public-ip-logging-ok --preferred-challenges dns-01 -d *....