Posts

TaskWarrior I’ve been looking for a better task management system to supplement my personal wiki/journal tool of silverbullet.md. Silverbullet offers some great functionality here with a bit of (space) lua, and I find it useful for managing projects, but found smaller tasks & reminders were a bit harder to implement, especially for things withspecific times or sub-tasks. After much searching for a simple FOSS solution, I discovered TaskWarrior via a YouTube Video, which ticks all the boxes for a tool which I was looking for. I am not someone who ’lives’ in a terminal, but I don’t mind a bit of CLI and would rather that over a clunky electron (urgh!) interface. TaskWarrior (hereafter refered to as task(1)) does not come with a sync solution out-of-the-box and relies on a separate server called TaskChampion, for syncing between devices. I have days where I don’t touch my desktop or laptop, and solely rely on my phone, so having everything talking to everything else is very important. This article doesn’t seek to be a tutorial about TaskWarrior itself (that will come later), but rather the steps required to configure a TaskChampion server using podman quadlet containers. ...

A recent effort of mine has to been to consolidate the various services and applications I’ve been running across my VPSs and homelab. The last piece of the puzzle was moving jellyfin off bare metal and into a container, a very straightforward process; but part of this transition was to also no longer use this domain as the reverse proxy for any service that I’m running. So simple, right? At least I thought so. Once I got the container up and running on my homelab, I setup the reverse proxy on another owned domain. As per usual I spent a few minutes troubleshooting things because I forgot to open the port on the server’s firewall, but my own errors aside, everything was working. So I did the last step, cleaning up /etc/relayd.conf. ...

A copy of this readme and examples can be found on my github Disclaimer I’m writing this documentation as I’m learning so there might be some mistakes. What is written are the steps I’ve taken to get my setup working. I’m posting here as I found it difficult to find practical examples of simple containers and the steps to get them running when searching online. I’ll update this as my journey with podman quadlets continues. ...

Moving back to Arch Recently I’ve moved back to Arch Linux, after deciding to rebuild my system. I’d been running Ubuntu LTS on my gaming pc for about two years. I was pretty happy with how things were running, snapd was a bit redundant on top of having flatpak and apt; and there were a few additional utilities and applications installed by default that I had no need for. Otherwise Ubuntu provides a solid distro which is easy to troubleshoot. However, while great for many reasons, running an LTS also means you’re not running the ’latest & greatest’ which sometimes means you miss out on nice features, or sometimes have to wait for bug fixes. ...

Running a FreeBSD desktop. Run a FreeBSD or NetBSD desktop. Rubenerd’s article encouraging people to try FreeBSD or NetBSD. Challenge accepted. I’ve been interested in *BSDs for about a year now. I’d learnt about them from a family member as a child, but stumbling upon Michael W. Lucas’ excellent talk about FreeBSD jails piqued my interest. Rubenerd’s recent article lead me to pulling my fedora nvme out of my laptop (a Thinkpad T470), putting another drive in, and installing FreeBSD… ...

Configuring a webserver using OpenBSD with httpd(8), relayd(8), and acme-client(1) Overview I wanted to move my rss aggregator miniflux.app off Miniflux’s (excellent, but paid) hosting option, and onto my own existing OpenBSD server. Miniflux is somewhat unique, in that it provides a single binary; no docker containers here! Both that binary miniflux and postgresql-contrib are available via pkg_add(1) This is the first time I’ve setup a server like this, particularly public-facing; so its taken a fair bit of trial and error and I thought it would be good to jot things down in case this helps others. ...

Can I do my job with OpenBSD? Introduction Why not be normal and use a Mac or Windows PC? Windows is horrible to use and Macs are too expensive1. Neither are Open Source. I’m not a fanatic about this, but it is something I’m passionate about, and will always default to FOSS where possible. I found it very easy to do my job with linux, so why not try using a *BSD? I know I probably can, but I want to find out. ...

Simple Zerotier setup on OpenBSD “ZeroTier is a smart programmable Ethernet switch for planet Earth. It allows all networked devices, VMs, containers, and applications to communicate as if they all reside in the same physical data center or cloud region.”* I personally use Zerotier to share assets between different geographical locations without having to worry about a third-party ddns service, putting holes in firewalls & port forwarding. Perfect for road warrior setups, or sharing a self-hosted Jellyfin server between two households. ...