BlogDB

Making this blog easier to read

Last month I was lucky enough to hop on a call with Oliver Schöndorfer. He runs the Pimp My Type blog and YouTube channel. I have been following Oliver’s channel for awhile, and tweaking this blog ...

Installing FreeBSD on Oracle Cloud

A short guide to installing FreeBSD on Oracle Cloud.

Funny artifacts in a 3D house scan

I like to window shop houses on Zillow. I really enjoy the recent trend of 3D interior scans, as they help give you a feeling for what the place is like, and it allows for another way to explore th...

Simple Testing with `git diff`

Simple Testing with git diff Automatic tests are great, but creating and maintaining them is time consuming and sometimes really complicated. Often, getting a moderate test coverage to prevent regr...

28 July, 2022

Yes. I felt and feel the same, and the current news are the saddest step backwards in my lifetime so far. I somewhat also feel the same about the Concorde. That thing was a symbol of engineering, a...

Including TikZ images in Rmarkdown

It is possible to draw TikZ graphics in Rmarkdown. Here is how. Install some tools on Debian/Ubuntu. libcurl Magick++ poppler-cpp libmagick++ Install pdftool and magick package in R. Open your rmar...

Triple Whammy of Loss of Wavelength, Routing Control Plane Crash, and IGP Issues

Background I have written many times about our network platform, with the peering and transit edge based around the open source VyOS project running on commodity hardware and our use of network aut...

Goodbye, MA2! Here We Come, MA5!

The full history of Reynolds House, Manchester, and its place within the datacentre industry in Manchester is over fifteen years long. Faelix was there relatively early in that story, as we install...

Exclude Unnecessary Information

The Elements of Style urges us to "omit needless words": Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that ...

Getting Started With a Private LoRaWAN Network

Note: Since publishing this post, ChirpStack released their version 4 LoRaWAN network server, which significantly changes the architecture and configuration. This post goes through setting up a net...

The three pillars of Developer Relations

This post is a fancified excerpt from Lee Robinson’s guest appearance on The Changelog podcast. Lee is the VP of Developer Experience at Vercel, so he really knows his stuff on this topic! To get t...

Slack Tasks

"You've got to hustle. Have a side-gig. Do personal projects. Build a personal brand." Such tips are frequently offered, commonly aspired to, and irregularly achieved. It is not entirely poor advic...

The Logitech Ergo M575 trackball

A short review of my first ever trackball Ever since switching to a split keyboard, using a mouse has been rather awkward. Do I put it in between the two halves? Not enough space. Do I put it to th...

Steam Deck and Overlay FS

A few months ago, I received my Steam Deck, the super powerful portable Linux gaming device made by Valve, the company behind Steam, and capable of playing Windows games without Windows. Taken by m...

Yes, yet...

"Yes, and..." is a concept from improv comedy that means to affirm and build on what others do. Beyond improv, it has been popularized as a pragmatic approach to positivity - say "yes" to validate ...

White-label ISP services in Preston

We’ve been working with Heaton Group since 2020. Heaton Group develops homes to rent, live and invest in, in high demand areas such as Bolton, Chorley, Central Manchester, Wigan and Warrington and ...

The best bits from KubeCon EU 2022

Now that everyone is back after KubeCon EU 2022, and all caught up with their notifications, it’s time for one more story of people, tech & upcoming #shipit episodes: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europ...

`make` as a Static Site Generator

make as a Static Site Generator Static site generators are in fashion for good reasons. The resulting pages are easy to host, fast and extremely low on maintenance while being sufficient for many u...

Astro SSR is still on the way but I have it in production already

An early adoption of Astro's Server Side Rendering capabilities that actually succeeded very well. Here you can find out what I used!

How redis expires keys? A dive into how TTL works internally in Redis. 🌊