Scenario: Congratulations, you won the lottery! You can barely believe your eyes as you stand there holding the winning ticket! It's amazing - so many feelings rush over you as you realize that some of your dreams are within reach now! You run over, nay, you float over to the lottery office to collect your winnings in pure excitement. You push open the doors to the building, scamper up to the front desk, present your ticket to the clerk, and the exchange goes something like this:

This is a really short, simple thing I use to alert me when a long-running shell command/script, like building (some) containers or compiling the kernel, is done. It effectively allows me to switch context in the meantime and pick up where I left off when the long-running dependency is finished.

I recently needed to compare two binary files (ISO images) in order to debug why one ISO would boot with legacy BIOS and the other wouldn't, even though they were presumably generated by the same tooling (turns out they weren't exactly, but that's not what this post is about.)

This is more or less a story about how one can attempt to debug an application crash by attaching to it with gdb and poking around, while resisting the urge to build the application manually. Such cases where this is useful might be when running something that takes a long time to compile, or which might have a complicated build system. It's easy to run into these situations when the system is relatively underpowered phone running Linux.

I recently started trying to figure out network booting for aarch64 single board computers (SBC), such as the Raspberry Pi, for a new CI I've been helping out with at my Igalia day job. For one reason or another, I never participated in the Raspberry Pi "fad" (maybe because they use Broadcom chips, which are [or were] notoriously unfriendly on Linux? I don't recall why... But I digress...)

But, I do have a quite capable aarch64 SBC just laying around, literally collecting dust... the Purism Librem 5 DevKit!

Blocking Facebook, and similarly-toxic sites/services, is a common theme amongst those who value privacy. Facebook goes to great lengths to track everyone, regardless of whether or not they have an account or use anything they "generously" offer to the public. Previously I had a long, long list of domains that Facebook owned, and set up unbound (the DNS resolver I run) to deny lookups to those domains. This was a classic game of cat & mouse, as Facebook would frequently acquire new domains and it was basically impossible to keep up.