I’ve recently been porting things from Samsung Smartthings to Home Assistant. Smartthings has a significantly lower learning curve, but suffered from a reliance on the cloud. While you have a local hub, any “custom” device handlers actually ran on the cloud on Samsung servers somewhere. Which means advanced functionality was often very, very slow.

A coworker graciously gave me an IBM RT3200! It’s a tenkeyless IBM keyboard with integrated trackpoint. However, I did have some issues getting scrolling working properly with a modern USB-based system running Wayland.

Like a large number of people around the world right now, my place of work has closed the doors for safety concerns. I’m fortunate enough to be in a position to work from home via VPN, but I did want to keep some separation between my work and non-work environments. The full-separation route would be creating a new user profile on my local machine. This would ensure complete separation. I didn’t go this route because I don’t need to keep everything separate.

Adventures with sharing host files with a KVM VM using 9p and libvirt with SELinux.

While checking out some logs and google search analytics, I found that my post about Discard (TRIM) with KVM Virtual Machines has been referenced far more than I expected it to be. I decided to take this opportitnity to fact-check and correct that article.

Fedora’s installer will happily set up an encrypted install with root-on-lvm-on-luks (/boot is still unencrypted. Secure Boot might be handy here still). This is supported and works out of the box. However, while I’m present when I reboot this machine, it is also headless (no keyboard or monitor), so typing a passphrase at boot is problematic. But no problem, you can have up-to ten key slots for a LUKS partition, right?

I recently decided to migrate this blog from IkiWiki to Hugo. I was expecting an ardous ordeal, but the entire task turned out to be fairly short painless.

Getting updated Windows media is certainly easier than it used to be. Back in the day, you’d have to slipstream updates into your installation media. It was a pain, and prone to cause problems (mainly because you could slipstream other things in there, too). Microsoft has seen the light and provides ISO downloads of the current version of Windows (Note: This is not a “free” Windows license – you still need to pay for that, or install on a machine which has been previously licensed).

I’ve spent the better part of one and a half years with the DDPai M6 Plus. I bought it based on the positive Techmoan review. tl;dr: I’m somewhat disappointed in the device. Something simpler like an A119S is a much better buy. Some background on me and dashcams I had a Mini 0805 in my last car, and have two Mini 0805’s (front+rear) in my second car (I just had the two cameras, and moved the front one into whichever vehicle I was driving).

If you’re considering trying out autocross, I say go for it. I’m very new, and have found people at the two events I’ve attended (WOSCA #1, and PITL #3) to be friendly and extremely helpful. Additionally, you can do it with your own car. You don’t need some sort of special race-spec track beast. Both events have also had loaner helmets available (although I spent $200 and bought my own helmet meeting the appropriate standards).