Posts in Technology

Nixos ydtools permission denied socket

To get ydotool running on Nixos Plasma with KDE you just need to:

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Nixos Blutooth cant enable after disable

On my a Lenovo Z13 Gen1 with Nixos / KDE Plasma 6.0.5 after the laptop goes into power saving mode the bluetooth adapter enters some kind of degraded state where it does not work properly, for example random disconnects or intermittent lag on bluetooth mouse or the device disappears all together.

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Native K8s Sidecar Containers with gluetun

I tried to use the new Kubernetes native Sidecar Containers introduced since v1.29. The initContainers and pod were stuck in PodInitializing state and the other containers were not starting up.

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External-DNS Policy flag

The behavior of the external-dns --policy flag is not documented in the external-dns docs. After looking at the code and experimentation the flags work like this:

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Deploy to K8s using helm without helm

On many occasions helm is not available directly on my cluster or I do not trust the author. So how can I deploy to my cluster without helm? Luckily helm can be configured to dump the template to on disk yaml manifests that can be applied to the target cluster. If you do not pass include-crds then no CRDs will be output and you will get errors later where CRDs are missing.

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Cert-manager can’t find route53 secret

It seems I did something to delete the original cert-manager Route53 secret, renewals and new certs failed with this error:

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Airpod reconnecting on Nixos

On my Apple Airpods Pro connected to Nixos vie bluetooth with KDE plasma, I get constant disconnect and reconnecting tones in the headset. The logs show this and the device number keeps incrementing after every reconnect:

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10GB Thunderbolt Other World Computing OWC Arch Linux

The device does not show up in arch linux until the thunderbolt security mode in BIOS is set to “Legacy” It is based on the AQC107 chip and drivers are provided.

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Opensearch failed to obtain node locks error

My cluster would not start up after killing the containers using the force, which means elasticsearch / opensearch did not get a chance to cleanly shutdown and remove the lock files. The error looks like this:

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Feline stationary angular momentum exercise habits, a temporal analysis.

Domesticated Feline engaged in stationary angular momentum exercise

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Make Search Great Again!

Internet search is basically useless now, I heard it described as “no longer a search engine, but an add serving platform”. The search results have deteriorated to the point where it is even worse than an add platform it is now just a market place.

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Philips HF3520

My HF3520 had a mainboard failure and my attempts to repair it also failed. I have salvaged some of the components. Trying to save the environment by keeping them out of landfill in the hope someone else needs the parts

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Lenovo Z13 Gen 1 Review

Last Updated: Feb 2, 2024

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Dell WD19TB screen flashing with M1 Mac

New 2022 M1 Macbook external display flickers when plugged into the Dell WD19TB docking station.

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Download page including assets loaded at runtime

curl and wget can be used to archive a site but even with the most exotic command line switches they will omit dynamically loaded assets pulled via javascript during run time. curl and wget will not follow them and the site will not work for later offline viewing. To download all the assets including dynamically loaded data we can generate a HAR file from the developer tools view in chrome.

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HA proxy upstream proxy support

Note: These are my notes during the creation of upstream proxy support, others in the HAProxy team have since picked up the work here.

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Arch Linux on X1 Carbon 6th Gen

This is a bunch of random notes on installing Arch Linux on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon 6th Gen.

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Arch Linux Tips

This is a bunch of random tips on Arch Linux.

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M5 Paper e-ink Calculator

I added an M5 Paper to my collection of dev boards and decided to make a basic calculator to teach my son to count. Since he is only a few months old he mostly uses it as an expensive teething device.

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Python 3.10 tips

Handy tips and notes about Python 30.8 10, 11 and beyond.

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TLS/SSL Certificate Authority (CA) Trust store verification

The CA trust store is how a TLS client establish trust with the servers offered certificates. Curl uses openssl and Python uses its own store (like Java). The store on my system is located here:

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AWS API Gateway notes

How to make a private REST API using AWS API Gateway that is only accessible from inside a VPC.

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Stringer Self Hosted RSS Reader

My setup is using the docker compose file and a local build of the docker image (since docker hub image is years old). Here is a dark theme (solarized) for the CSS. Just paste this over your stringer/app/assets/stylesheets/application.css file. I did not spend much time on it but it looks good enough for my taste.

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Intercept HTTP/HTTPS TLS traffic

Use open source project mitmproxy and have visibility into what iOS apps (or anything else) are sending back to their mother ship.

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Moved blog to alabaster with Sphinx

Mostly notes to self on how to deploy and architecture / setup. Inspired by https://github.com/vincentbernat/vincent.bernat.ch

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Kubernetes tips

The problem is solved by removing the leading slash after the podname colon separator:

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Enterprise tips for AWS Workspaces and AWS Managed AD

::: note ::: title Note :::

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Expose WSL2 To LAN

I need to connect to my WSL2 container from other machines on the network over SSH: My container is assigned 172.24.208.2 and I will map 5022 to 22 on the host.

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Docker Tips

Random useful docker stuff

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Gitlab

Random notes on Gitlab

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Empty the clipboard as keystrokes with AutoHotKey (Windows)

This is an AutoHotKey script for pasting the clipboard contents by simulating hardware keystrokes. It also fixes stuck keys such as control and shift keys after the shortcut runs which are useful when pasting into a KVM, VMware console, RDP or Citrix session where latency is high or clipboard support doesn’t exist.

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postfix/smtp[5600]: fatal: valid hostname or network address required in server description

Getting the error:

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Python quick dirty ping scan subnet

This script will automatically ping scan the subnet your host is connected to. To do this it does the following:

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Random git tips

Remove bad commit via interactive rebase:

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Proxyify application that does not support proxy

I have a legacy application that needs to connect over a proxy such as squid or HAProxy to a service on the internet. In other words I want to use netcat (nc) or something similar to proxy traffic through a proxy using the proxy protocol (or CONNECT method).

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Bash Tips

The ultimate guide is here

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Error when checking or applying host profile compliance “coredump partition”

The following error message occurs when you either

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EMC VNX CLARiiON hacking MLUCLI

I stumbled upon on an Ebay bargain I could not resist, thankfully my old boss and good friend Wilhelm kindly allowed me to purchase a VNX 7600 with all the drives, and run the monster in a closet in our office! W.W also let me spend some time exploring the internals of the VNX. The original owner shuffled all the drives around including the sacred first 5 drives that contain the FLARE OS rendering it useless.

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LiPo Charging Hack

When trying to charge a LiPo that had been drained to 0 voltage I was getting an error:

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How to check MTU with ping on ESX (or any OS)

Just keep decreasing the packet size with -s flag on the ping command:

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2147943712 Task Scheduler

When trying to get the Task Scheduler to run regardless of if a user is logged on or not.

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Make any Windows window transparent

Everything displayed in the Windows user session is ultimately controlled by the Windows GDI Any everything displayed in a users session must run as that user (without modifying kernel or display drivers). Python provides a convenient API to control GDI.

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Failover Cluster add disk fails on Windows

When trying to add a new cluster disk in a Failover Cluster the following error comes up in the report.

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Big O Notation Cheat Sheet

Big O Notation

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