A place for short form thoughts and ideas
This page lists entries for the current year, for past entries consult the microblog archive.
Just added a new tab to the site, film. AND IM SO HAPPY I HAVE A SPACE TO DUMP MY PICTURES. I didn’t really want to post them on Instagram cause theres too many pictures from 1 roll, and I didn’t really want to filter them. Here, at least I can dump them and not really think too hard.
Getting my images here was a journey though. Initially, I assumed zine had a $page.assets directive that I could use to iterate through the images. It didn’t appear to have one, so that got me to dive into the surprisingly complex zine codebase, and implemented that here.
After building that, I tried to create a docker file with zig 0.15.1 and my zine version, and found out how annoying it is to do that. So I decided to dive into the codebase and realized that zine could read json files.
This gave me a much simpler way of inserting the images into the page, by creating a json file, listing the images (ls *.webp > images.json, and a quick vim macro) and consuming that from the film.shtml.
Thats the previous version, and now, I’ve moved the images.json to the frontmatter of the index.shtml and that seems much easier to maintain.
The final step, would be to create a zig build which checks the frontmatter of any file in the film directory, and if it doesn’t have a particular image in the directory, update the frontmatter.
In the spirit of procastinating on my hard projects, I decided to clean up my nix files, and have some organization in the chaos. The current configuration can be found here, old configuration here
I didn’t think I needed flake-parts as I wasn’t really writing a lot of modules(? I believe?), but wanted a cleaner way of organizing the files. I found snowfall lib and I’ve just made the switch to that.
Snowfall is quite interesting, basically providing a opinionated structure to organizing your nix files. The best part is that it auto imports all modules you’ve defined in the modules folder to both home-manager and NixOS, so that makes the configuration a bit more “magicky” but simpler.
I used to not appreciate magic, cause it made tracing code harder (Didn’t really enjoy my foray into Ruby on Rails in 2017), and you had entire IDEs to making that experience better. Nix, being more of a configuration languge, I’m okay with the tradeoffs of magic for simpler configs.
At the same time, I think it’ll be easy to migrate off snowfall, I’m not using any of snowfall’s more complex features, and will just need a function to auto inject the imports into every home manager and nixOS configuration.
After yesterday morning’s snafu, I gave up on the project and decided to just bring it to a shop to fix. Just for posterity’s sake, I decided to try to boot the computer again and IT WORKED? My friend aptly put it as “the load bearing dust accumulated (back in the case)” so now I’m off to finishing the build.
Also I’ve somehow managed to kill an Intel DC S3500 SSD, so now I’m running all of my SSDs in RAID 1 or higher levels.
I should think of renaming my PC from falcon to pheonix…
So… I built the computer, put it back into its case, and for a sanity test, I tried booting it up and… it went into the BIOS once, and then crashed and it didn’t boot after that…
I fear I might have overtightened the cooler but I don’t really think that should have caused issues like this. Reseated the CPU and tried booting it up and it seems to work again?
Nope, back to failing to boot. I tried with with multiple different configurations, reseating the RAM and no dice… This is starting to get very very frustrating
My PC - aka falcon - has been faithfully running under my table with no issues for the past ~7 years with no issue, the i7-8700k and the 1070Ti running happily.
I was overseas in Canada for the past year, and it happily ran with only 1 minor issue, the CMOS battery dying and the computer failing to reboot after a power failure, and also a memory upgrade, bumping from 32Gb to a 64Gb, by my father.
I came back, saw the dust covered PC and slightly rusting PC and decided it was time for a deep clean. Opened it up, used a air blower and blew out the dust. Tried swapping out the GPU with a A2000 ADA that I just bought for my minisforum (while my cooler is still on delivery) and now the computer failed to boot, being stuck in a bootloop, with no display out from both the dGPU and the iGPU.
The AsRock Z390 Phantom Gaming 4 is “very well designed”, with no indicators (LEDs or displays) of any kind, making the issue even harder to debug. I tried booting it again with my trusty 1070Ti and had still no output.
I guess I did blow out some load bearing dust…
I’m assuming i’ve killed the motherboard and am picking up a 2nd hand motherboard, so wish me luck.
I picked up the motherboard, moved the CPU, RAM and SSDs over and it seemed to boot! Time to assemble the rest of the computer together.
Another thing I’m exploring is writing a helm chart. I’ve got one generated by Claude here but I feel like it’s overkill for what I’m trying to do. So going through the generated templates and removing unnecessary stuff. For reference, I’m using podinfo’s helm chart to see what I actually need
I’ve recently got my hands on a Minisforum MS-A2 and have been wanting to join it to my home cluster. Instead, i’ve been tinkering around writing cleaner nix code… Giving Up Pausing on that for now, and just shoving code into the configuration.nix.
Also got myself a A2000 ADA but at its current form factor, does not fit into the MS-A2. Just ordered a cooler so that this GPU fits into a smaller form factor case. and hopefully with that, I have a mini portable powerhouse.
Just as I bought this, I started seeing benchmarking results for the Ryzen AI Max 395+, and it seems to be blowing this out of the water, due to its unified memory(?) architecture
This is the first entry in this year’s microblog created with Zine! I’m exploring using Jujutsu as a VCS right now, and it seems interesting. The site data can be found here.