NotAShelf's Blog

A little while ago I wrote an article I have titled titled "Taste Is All That's Left" arguing, well, that taste is all that's left in the current age.

import Banner from "@components/Banner.astro"; For most of the time I have been writing software---which, compared to some of my readers, is not that long---I have come to believe that the hard thing was making the thing exist at all.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about my relationship with mathematics.

Most, if not all, Nix tools I build (or at least, consider building) eventually want to do one little, very boring thing.

Not long ago---by which I mean an annoyingly short time ago---I wrote a post titled I'm Moving to a Farm.

I think I'm depressed.

Nix's substituter model is one of those designs that is almost right, but isn't exactly there.

I'll start with a disclaimer that I know will bother some of you.

The Rust GUI ecosystem has matured into a landscape of impressive, specialized tools.

Howdy!

Not so long ago, I have spent quite a bit of time writing a new component for my site.

There has been some growing current of enthusiasm recently, around so called vibe "coding."

This post is greatly inspired by the awesome article The Federation Fallacy by Alyssa Rosenzweig.

If you have ever worked on any serious codebase, then you probably know how truly deceptive confidence can be; you push a change, tests pass, CI is all green and the voice in your head yells "MERGE ON GREEN!"

import Banner from "@components/Banner.astro"; It starts innocently.

I am a sick man...

One of the things that convinced me to stay on NixOS was how easy it is to write integration tests for my existing infrastructure.

I have began programming with Javascript back in 2018.

Those of you who have been a part of the Nix ecosystem, more specifically the community that often deals with flakes,1 have no doubt noticed or perhaps actively use the nixConfig attribute in a flake.nix.

import Banner from "@components/Banner.astro"; Recently I have encountered a PR in Nixpkgs that implements the necessary groundwork for building fully declarative documents using Typst, similar to other language-specific builders you might be familiar wit…

Hi all, good news first.

A Linux system is a complex ecosystem of components, each with its own set of vulnerabilities.

Resources https://blog.gitbutler.com/git-tips-and-tricks/ Setting up SSH signing for Git commits For the longest of times, I have been running an obscure GPG setup using Yubikeys that requires me to go back to my notes every time I wish to replicate it on…

Nix is a package manager--nay, a build tool1 that is capable of scaling both vertically and horizontally through its Binary Caches and Remote Builders respectively.

Impermanence is an interesting concept.

If you've ever used Nix/NixOS to a certain extent, perhaps one where you can call yourself "proficient", you might have needed to write your own custom functions, "store" them somewhere, and pass them around.

If you have spent time in traditional programming languages, then you have probably relied on conditionals (if-else, switch, case) at least once in In Nix, as a result of lazy evaluation, many of those constructs become less relevant less relevant---or ou…

Not so long ago, while performing maintenance on my VPS and setting up Prometheus, Grafana, and related tools, I noticed something unexpected yet not entirely surprising.

Programs fail, even the best-written ones.

After hours on end of reckless consideration and rewriting, I have finally crafted my static site generator---a basic (but extremely inelegant) Bash script---and my blog is now fully live.

Just is a fast and powerful command runner, built with Rust.

Resources https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/keyboard_shortcuts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/sysrq.html https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/admin-guide/sy…

Today's main attraction is the Headscale setup on my VPS running NixOS, which I've finally came around to self-host.

My VPS, which hosts some of my infrastructure, has been running NixOS for a while now.

Recently I have had to go through the misfortune of hosting some websites written with NextJS on my VPS running NixOS, this note entry shall document my experience and the "easy" path I have chosen.

Following a large system upgrade two days ago, my HP Pavilion laptop has stopped registering the intel_backlight device interface in /sys/class/backlight - which is most often used by tools such as brightnessctl or light to control active backlight level.