marcus

At work, we’re passionate about data diven decisions. Among others we use Grafana to visualize our key metrics . We recently acquired a number of dual TV stands for our teams, and we wanted to use them to display our Grafana dashboards. After experimenting with PI4s and finding the 4k support lacking, we decided to use go for a n100-based mini pc model. Flashing and maintaining a number of pcs can be painful, so we desided to use a declarative setup and flash stateless NixOS configurations. In order to bootstrap the PCs as quickly as possible, we use nixos-unattended-installer and disko.

Attended Fosdem again this year and had a blast. Made a conference report for work, so figure I might as well post it here too. :)

I am using the Hugo static site generator to generate this blog. I am also using devenv to manage my development environments. This also includes the blog. This ensures I can easily build and run the blog locally, and keep up to date with the latest Hugo version, without having to install anything on my host system. Devenv also provides easy integration with pre-commit to allow linting of the markdown files, and CI integration with GitHub Actions.

With the recent AI craze, it’s fun to play with local models. I like ollama, which lets you easily download and interact with various models. Thanks to this recently merged PR, it’s now trivial to run your own ollama service on nixos:

services.ollama.enable = true;

Adding this to your host config and rebuilding is all it takes to start the service, and you can then interact with it via the cli or rest interface. For instance to talk to the mistral model, you can do:

Interesting article which discourages the use of web application firewalls. I feel they have some pretty solid arguments.

We have indeed worked around some or these problems, by automatically dismissing stale reviews, mostly having single commit PRs and so on, but I strongly agree this model would just be better.

For the last few years, we’ve had managed alarm service from Sector Alarm. It’s mostly been OK, but the price has been increasing every year, and they never upgrade our components, so when I learned about the offering from Homely, I was intrigued.

Basically you own your own components, and pay a monthly fee for monitoring. The components are mostly Zigbee-based, and there’s a home assistant integration to get the status into my home assistant setup, so I decided to give it a go.

I learned a lot from this article detailing how to make your own .com executable format for Linux. Also loved this little nugget:

All these others are just sitting around, neglected. We should start using them more. I mean, why not? Heck, put emojis in your filenames. I’m not your dad. Alan, if you’re reading this: I forbid you to put emojis in your filenames

Nice pragmatic intro to my favorite Linux distribution.