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Author: kepstin

Manifest Generation in Exherbo

Manifest Generation in Exherbo

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In my own developer package repository, and in merge requests I have made recently to official Exherbo repositories, I have started to include Manifest files alongside the Exheres packaging. This post is an attempt to document how I have the tooling set up for semi-automatically generating manifests. The cave tool includes a cave digest subcommand which inherits the manifest generation code which had originally been developed for Gentoo. It can be used with Exherbo, but it requires some custom configuration…

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Babel Routing over Wireguard for the Tubes

Babel Routing over Wireguard for the Tubes

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What are The Tubes? They are an experimental overlay network for doing, uh, sysadmin LARP? Some public information about the setup can be seen over at https://pvpn.reclaim.technology/. Anyways, as the overlay network grows, we want to make the network more mesh-like instead of star-like. And that means we need a routing protocol. After considering BGP and OSPF, I found some information about the Babel routing protocol. It promised to be simpler to set up, capable of handling optimal routing in…

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The easy way to get a 3-button T450/T450s Synaptics touchpad working on a T440p in Windows

The easy way to get a 3-button T450/T450s Synaptics touchpad working on a T440p in Windows

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Important: This only applies to Synaptics touchpads, not ALPS! OctoPerf’s T440p buyer’s guide includes some hints on how to tell them apart. This is a simplified version of the instructions based on Nick Heim’s blog post which goes through the process of how the registry file below was created. So, most of the instructions for setting up the 3-button touchpad on a T440p to get proper trackpoint buttons are unnecessarily complicated. They’ll ask you to reboot into safe mode to…

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Survey of terminal palettes: DIR_COLORS edition

Survey of terminal palettes: DIR_COLORS edition

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A quick run through of how various GNOME terminal palettes look like with the 8-color+bold DIR_COLORS file shipped with coreutils and used by many Linux distributions. Tango is a fairly light value but low saturation palette. The light background is an odd off-white shade that reduces contrast. When the “Show bold text in bright colors” option is enabled, bright cyan and bright green over the light background have minimal contrast. When using a dark background, the palette gives reasonable results,…

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Thoughts on OpenWRT and OSTree

Thoughts on OpenWRT and OSTree

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In theory, OpenWRT should work reasonably well with OSTree – it’s already designed to be run with an immutable base layer (for squashfs images). In terms of adapting OpenWRT to run on OSTree, the hardest thing I can think of would be working out how to do the bootloader on embedded devices. I don’t know enough about this space to know what has to be done here. OSTree currently works by putting kernel images and BootLoaderSpec config files into a…

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Ryzen Motherboard ECC Memory Summary

Ryzen Motherboard ECC Memory Summary

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Update (2017-06-22): After looking at the poor state of ECC support for a while, I ended up picking up an MSI B350 TOMAHAWK board, which does not support ECC. A variety of factors contributed to this, not the least of which that it had PCI ports legacy hardware support. The end result? I’m no longer actively researching ECC support on Ryzen boards, so this list is probably going to steadily go out of date. Please feel free to contact me…

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Blast from the Past: 2003

Blast from the Past: 2003

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I found a backup of my old site, made in 2003 or thereabouts as best I can tell. Other than a couple dead link cleanups and removal of interactive elements (seriously, a guestbook?), it’s there almost as it was. Check it out.

Scanning CDs with CCD/LED scanners

Scanning CDs with CCD/LED scanners

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So, back on my recommended scanners post, I made a note that CCD sensor scanners that use LED lighting – which at this point is basically all of them – have an issue with scanning CDs. It looks like this: This is, frankly, quite awful. It’s hard to read anything with the light pattern that appears, and it doesn’t look anything like the classic highlight that you see when holding a CD under a single light source, or on a…

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Recommended Scanners for Album Art Scanning

Recommended Scanners for Album Art Scanning

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Here’s a quick list of currently available scanner models that I recommend for people doing album art scanning. The Criteria I’m not covering scanning 12″ vinyl in this guide. For that, you need a large format scanner, which is a completely different price category of professional equipment – or use a camera and a glare-free lighting rig instead. There are two basic kinds of scanners currently available, distinguished by the type of image sensor: CCD and CIS (Contact Image Sensor)….

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