Update for the week ending on Friday, Jan 24, 2025

mtlynch.io

• Continued working on my year 7 retrospective
• Published “How to Resolve Local Hostnames in OPNSense”
  • I always get frustrated by the fact that resolving hostnames doesn’t work out of the box on OPNsense, so I published my notes
  • I got feedback from readers that I think makes it work consistently now
  • tl; dr - You’re not supposed to use the .local domain for local networks
• Started working on an article about compiling C projects in Zig
• Fixed the RSS feed and added a linter to sanity check the RSS XML
• Updated my NixOS on Pi 4 post
  • I was hoping to run the latest NixOS builds, but they don’t work on Pi 4
• Add back historical prices to my 2017 homelab post
  • I removed them when I was an Amazon affiliate, but I’m not anymore, so I want to show the real prices

Refactoring English

• Continued working on chapter on passive voice
• Created a quiz for identifying passive voice

fusion

fusion is an open-source RSS reader I found when looking for an RSS aggregator to host on my NixOS system. I like that it’s written in Go and uses SQLite as a backend, so it’s pretty easy to self-host. The maintainer is very responsive to PRs as well.

• Fixed a security vulnerability I accidentally introduced so that fusion just fully stopped checking users’ passwords 😬

zenith

• Migrated to the pre-release version of Zig 0.14.0
  • The hard part was figuring out how to make the Nix flake set up a dev shell with pre-release Zig

Printer

• I have a Brother printer that’s great except that it’s LAN-only
• I use a Raspberry Pi running CUPS to drive it, but every year or two, the microSD breaks, and I have to recreate it
• I used Ansible scripts to provision it, but they’re sort of fiddly and require my environment to be in the right Ansible state
• I finally did the process over with simple bash scripts
• I also backed up the microSD image so that if it breaks in the future, I hopefully just have to reflash a microSD and then not do anything else

PicoShare

PicoShare is a minimalist web-based file sharing tool I’m working on. I’m often frustrated that I can’t just send someone a link directly to a file because every file-sharing service tries to re-encode images/video or wrap their own viewer around other files, so I’m making a simple self-hostable tool that lets you upload files and share them with other people.

• Continued testing a migration to the ncruces implementation of the Go SQLite driver
  • I’m still running into issues, but they’re helpful because ncruces catches SQLite errors that the mattn driver ignores
• Fixed the entry_id column data type in the downloads table
  • Apparently SQLite lets me just stick strings into INTEGER columns and doesn’t say a word
• Added rollbacks for transactions
  • I always thought this just happened automatically on error, but the Go docs say that all transactions should end with either Rollback or Commit.
  • Also reduced log spew when transaction is complete
• Fixed a regression on the system information page
• Added lint-sql script to git pre-commit hook
• Use single quotes in bash examples

Misc

• Set up my new 10 G router
  • Now, I can enjoy the full 2 Gbps speeds I pay for with my fiber ISP
  • In practice, I usually only get about 1.2-1.5 Gbps down, but I consistently get 2 Gbps up, which is helpful for my nightly backups
  • With Spectrum, I’d get about 2-20 Mbps up, so my nightly backups sometimes ran for 12+ hours and choked all other networking when I started my workday
• Officially became a Rack Studs convert
  • It took me a long time to understand the difference between red and purple studs
    • The difference is the thickness of the metal where you attach nuts / studs
  • I bought the sample pack that had 4 red / 4 purple
  • Both actually fit, but the purple fit more comfortably, whereas the reds I had to force a bit more
  • This was my second attempt at using the /dev/mount studs, and they didn’t line up properly with my router
• Fixed automated backups for What Got Done
  • I hadn’t set them up since switching from Windows to NixOS
  • I got a pretty clean setup in NixOS that allows me to back up snapshots of any of my litestream-sync’ed databases
  • Once I set up What Got Done, it was trivial to start snapshotting ScreenJournal, which I hadn’t been backing up locally
• Started working with accountant on 2024 taxes
  • Recategorized some aspects of my bookkeeping to better match IRS categories
• Made a small fix to openage, the open-source reimplementation of Age of Empires
• Put some old computers up for sale
• Worked on will / estate planning
• Returned my Spectrum equipment