Author: kepstin

  • Manifest Generation in Exherbo

    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…

  • Babel Routing over Wireguard for the Tubes

    What are The Tubes? They were an experimental overlay network for doing, uh, sysadmin LARP? Some public information about the setup could be seen over at pvpn.reclaim.technology (archive link; the network is no longer running). Anyways, as the overlay network grew, we wanted to make the network more mesh-like instead of star-like. And that means…

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

    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…

  • Survey of terminal palettes: DIR_COLORS edition

    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”…

  • Thoughts on OpenWRT and OSTree

    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…

  • Ryzen Motherboard ECC Memory Summary

    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…

  • Blast from the Past: 2003

    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.

  • Should you move your site to HTTPS?

    Yes. In most cases, it’s easy – and free! Check out Let’s Encrypt.

  • Scanning CDs with CCD/LED scanners

    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…

  • Recommended Scanners for Album Art Scanning

    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…