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2025 Update This post has aged remarkably well from its original release on 2023-12-11.

A pattern I've seen happen many times is where people (often new to Nix) overuse Nix in a manner that makes their lives harder, in order to make their systems ostensibly more reproducible and often get the bad side of the tradeoffs inherent in using it.

Recently I had a very hard problem on my hands: Lix on macOS wasn't terminating daemons when the client vanished (e.g. if the client got CTRL-C'd or crashed).

Start of Meetup: "hmm, Kane is using nixos channels, that's not good, it's going to gaslight you" 6 hours later: Utterly bamboozled by channels 6.5 hours later: I am no longer using channels - @riking@social.wxcafe.net Nix channels, which, just like Nix,…

Although Nix supposedly makes pinning things easy, it really does not seem so from a perspective of looking at other software using pinning: it is not possible to simply write package = "^5.0.1" in some file somewhere and get one package pinned at a speci…

I was making memes in the CTF room until someone told me Nix showed up on a CTF, and well.

An idea I have lying around is something I am going to call "ca-tracing" for the purposes of this post.

Inflammatory title out of the way, let's go.

I was debugging an issue with a friend's website that was Safari-only, and a pretty funny issue at that: autoplay videos won't play inside iframes, even if the navigation of the iframe is caused by a user gesture.

This is a quick post to write down the method that worked for me to acquire and pull apart a Dell UEFI image to get the executables out, and how to poke at ACPI.

This is a quick post about an issue I debugged in a package build that didn't matter, which may however still be instructive.

Slides here: https://jade.fyi/nixcon2023/slides/

I have been using an unmaintained fork of prezto since 6 years ago, which has been mostly completely fine.

Sometimes I get jealous of web developers for having real network debugging tools for watching HTTP traffic, as (primarily) a native developer.

As part of the third year design studio class for Computer Engineering at UBC, I worked on a group project using a FPGA, electronics, and other pieces.

Modern cameras put a lot of metadata into images: GPS location Device model Camera software version Subject distance Facing direction Colour profiles Time, with timezone Reasonable camera stuff like ISO, shutter speed, flash usage, focal length This is mo…

I have been working on a school project, which uses Intel FPGAs and the proprietary Intel Quartus toolchain.

Nix has a feature called "import from derivation", which is sometimes called "such a nice foot gun" (grahamc, 2022).

the first thing our new hire did was fix a bug that's been bugging him forever as a user prior to joining. he then breathed a sigh of relief and submitted his two weeks' notice. wtf??

Dealing with PDFs is something I do every day as someone working in software, especially given that I tend toward both research and lower-level work where papers and datasheets rule.

Well, that sure was a thing.

Note: I just rewrote the syntax highlighter for my site's generator, Zola, to use tree-sitter, and there are probably some deficiencies.

I delivered a talk "Debugging Closure Size Graphically" at NixCon 2022.

I found something mysterious while working on a large Haskell codebase: there was a Cabal target called test:test-dev, containing test and src in source-dirs.

A problem I sometimes have is dealing with a bunch of independently maintained but very interdependent libraries, for which I would like proper IDE functionality cross-project.

I work in a thoroughly Nix-based environment, and sometimes I need to test NixOS things, but I have a Mac at work.

When writing, debugging, or otherwise working with Nix expressions, it is often useful to run a build part of the way through, or to run it manually in a shell.

Note A previous version of this article unfairly implied that Firefox has better SVG standards conformance than Inkscape.

Say you have to contribute to some project run by Unix bros who want the 90s back, so they don't use GitHub or its many self-hosted alternatives to accept pull requests, and you need to email them a patch.

I have wasted a lot of time debugging multi-process systems, especially those that are some native program with a shell startup script.

In this year's crop of classes, I am using some Fun™ software in obsolete versions that would work properly if I would just use Windows like a reasonable person.

nixpkgs has good built in support for building Docker images, but there is a significant amount of nuance to using it effectively and making small images.

Improving and automating my workflow is something I have put considerable investment into, and I would like to share what I can.

A while ago I read a tweet that reminded me I felt guilty about the state of my ssh key security and wanted to do something about it, eventually.

Recently, I was working on a tool that incidentally makes ephemeral units on the systemd user instance to do what one would use atd for on an older system.

TL;DR: check out my GNU docs builds at https://docs.jade.fyi/gnu They uniquely have: Limited width/better-font-size CSS I wrote One big page for each tool!!

Hi!

It is a poorly guarded secret that the most effective way to get documentation on nixpkgs or nix functions is to read the source code.

I'm going to try a new style of blog post for this one, more of a lab notebook style.

I recently was brutally nerdsniped into developing a strange Rust library that turns prints into uwu-speak.

Hello!

This post was inspired by a hypothetical closed source piece of software from a hardware vendor, written in Java, which has unusable font rendering that makes it inaccessible for me, but I need to use it for class, so what am I to do?

In my Google CTF entry for writeonly this year, I wrote my first stage shellcode in C, which was somewhat novel in and of itself, as it seemed like few people were willing to brave linker scripts to be able to write shellcode in C.

Template Haskell powers a lot of really neat functionality in Yesod and friends, but sometimes it can be broken.

I participated in the 2020 Google CTF on the UBC CTF team Maple Bacon.

I'm writing this post because I work every day in WSL 2 on my main computer and I feel it might be useful to those trying to get a productive setup running.

UPDATE: August 28, 2021 - There is now much improved official documentation of a lot of this material.

I recently acquired a new keyboard, which was a Whole Thing (tm) as I ordered it right at the end of Chinese New Year's, in time for the entire country to be locked down for COVID-19 reasons so it ended up turning up yesterday, three months later.

I just rewrote the formerly-Ghost blog in Gatsby, which may improve performance, will definitely improve image loading, and will substantially simplify maintenance.

As part of developing this new version of this site, I've needed to mess with nginx a lot to switch from Ghost to Gatsby, especially when related to hosting files out of multiple directories.