About a month ago
- The shell sits in front of a lot of my work, but I mostly use it for the outcome: running unix commands and scripts, creating branches and making commits. Unlike when I'm writing code, I'm rarely thinking about how the shell itself works under the hood.So, to dig a bit deeper...
- I recently started a new platform where I sell my books and courses, and in this website I needed to send account related emails to my users for things such as email address verification and password reset requests. The reasonable option that is often suggested is to use a paid...
about 1 month ago
- this is part 2 of a two-part series on how container images and filesystems work: what is a container image? how does my container get a root filesystem? intro in part 1, we built a two-layer OCI image by hand, imported it into containerd, and ran it. we saw that a container...
about 2 months ago
- Six years ago, while I should have been studying for finals, I patched and compiled X11 (and all its dependencies) to run on a jailbroken iPad. I wanted to run real applications on my tablet. I've spent the last few months weeks days hours building vibecoding something that...
2 months ago
- For the last few months, I have been developing a new reporting application. Early on, I decided to add a –dry-run option to the run command. This turned out to be quite useful – I have used it many times … Continue reading →...
3 months ago
- Blog About Moonbound Shop This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me. January 17, 2026 Fairies and squirrels in a forest, ca. 1824–1883, Richard Doyle Sprites is an interesting new platform offering little...
- A guide to connect a Synology NAS to a WireGuard VPN server....
4 months ago
- Note: this post represents my personal opinions as a Debian maintainer of a single package (Meson). It is not my intention to throw anyone involved in the service under a bus, but some things about it are not good and need to be spoken aloud (in my opinion anyway, other people...
6 months ago
- Microsoft is officially ending support for Windows 10 in October 2025, and for millions of PC users, that sounds like bad news, because you may not have the right hardware for Windows 11, or you may not want all of your personal data vacuumed up by Microsoft. But here’s the...
- Locality, and Temporal-Spatial Hypothesis Good fences make good neighbors? Last week at PGConf NYC, I had the pleasure of hearing Andres Freund talking about the great work he’s been doing to bring async IO to Postgres 18. One particular result caught my eye: a large difference...
- I had not encountered the grib2 format before, but it is popular for this kind of data. A brief web search reveals the wgrib2 command-line tool might be helpful. Let’s see, is that in nixpkgs?… Nope. But we can add it. It’s a straightforward CMake build process with no required...
- Create a .hushlogin file in your home directory to silence login messages....
7 months ago
- Exploring the trend of rewriting existing software in new programming languages, this article delves into the balance between innovation and practicality in software development....
- In a world dominated by modern programming languages, C remains a powerful choice for low-level system programming and efficiency. Here's why I still choose C for certain projects....
- I’m teaching my five-year old to use computers1 Through a non-graphical NetBSD installation. Everyone says I’m crazy but I think it might just work for him. I’ll let you know how it goes., and he’s arrived at the point where he might need a text editor. None of the ones I know...
- I accidentally misconfigured one of my NixOS servers – a Hetzner vps – rather badly: too much ofthe disko configuration (which determines filesystem layouts) was shared between servers. When applied to a server that didn’t have an external volume it refused to finish booting...
8 months ago
- Last week, Armin and I worked together on the latest release of Himitsu, a “secret storage manager” for Linux. I haven’t blogged about Himitsu since I announced it three years ago, and I thought it would be nice to give you a closer look at the latest release, both for users...
9 months ago
- Ubuntu’s Snap packaging system was introduced with the promise of universal Linux applications, easy updates, and robust security through confinement. While these goals are admirable, the reality of Snap for many desktop users has been a source of frustration, leading to a...
- 7/18/2025 (Title written with apologies to Sandi Metz.) One of the biggest fallacies in coding is that dependencies have zero downsides. It's treated as free functionality you don't have to write yourself. Wow, what a deal! But dependencies absolutely have a cost. They may...
- FUSE filesystem where file operations are handled by an LLM....
- Today, we’re looking at two case studies in how to respond when reactionaries appear in your free software community. Exhibit A It is a technical decision. The technical reason is that the security team does not have the bandwidth to provide lifecycle maintenance for multiple X...
10 months ago
- Writing your own standard library is all fun and games until someone (which is to say yourself) asks the important question: could this be actually used for real? Theories and opinions can be thrown about the issue pretty much forever, but the only way to actually know for sure...
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