Oldposts

Ongoing changes at Twitter led me to take a second look at mastodon, including running my own mastodon instance. 🐘

Running gets me outside and gives me a challenge where I can compete against myself. Here are my tips for becoming an amateur runner. 🎽

Mikrotik routers and switches serve as efficient network devices, but they know other tricks, too. Monitor your UPS with a Mikrotik device and query it via SNMP. 🔌

Tailscale exit nodes allow you to route your traffic through nearly any system in your tailnet. Learn how to build an exit node using firewalld. 🕳️

Success at work depends on more than your technical ability. Improve your soft skills to increase your impact. 💪

Get systems online quickly or rescue a broken system by PXE booting from netboot.xyz using a Mikrotik router. 🛠

This feels very meta, but I thought it would be a good idea to share my blog post writing process anyway. 📝

This book teaches you more than dieting – it changes how you think about food entirely. 🍽

Some people say I just enjoy the sound of my mechanical keyboard too much. 🤭 I see it as a simpler, more consistent workflow.

Add encrypted ssh keys to your workflow more efficiently with gnome-keyring in the sway window manager.

Efficiently communicate a problem and your recommendation in record time with an SBAR. 📝

The original icanhazip.com lives on, but the other services are going offline. 😢

Because nobody wants an inefficient emoji workflow. 🙈

Reload your sway config without disrupting Firefox. 🔥

Learn how to customize a CentOS Stream 9 cloud image with the stuff you want and nothing that you don’t. 📦

Keep prying eyes away from your sites behind Traefik with basic authentication. 🛃

Store encrypted kubernetes secrets safely in your gitops repository with easy-to-use age encryption. 🔐

Access files over NFS within kubernetes pods with a quick volume mount. 🗄

Upgrade your Supermicro BIOS firmware from Linux using their SUM utility. 🔧

Learn how to install TD Ameritrade’s ThinkOrSwim desktop application on Linux and get everything working. 💸

The alacritty terminal on Fedora enables HiDPI mode by default. Break out your magnifying glasses as we disable HiDPI. 👓

Host your own personal URL shortener with GitHub Actions and Cloudflare Workers. No web or database servers required! 🥰

Brave recently changed how their browser reads managed policy configuration, but luckily the fix is an easy one. 🔧

At first I thought Twitter was the problem, but then I realized I was making poor choices. 🤔

Want to build your own Fedora 35 image for AWS? Use Image Builder to build and deploy an image made just for you. 🏗

Provision services on Microsoft’s Azure CLI on Fedora 35. 💙

Tailscale provides a handy private network mesh across multiple devices but it needs security just like any other network. 🕵

One of the smallest ThinkPads delivers one of the best experiences I’ve had on a laptop. 💻

Package up graphical applications in containers and run them with podman. 🚢

Adjust the LED backlight on your laptop quickly in i3 on Linux. 💡

Learn how to forward ports with firewalld for IPv4 and IPv6 destinations. 🕵🏻

I set out to read a bunch of books this summer and succeeded! Here’s my reading list. 📚

Sometimes network interface autonegotiation doesn’t work as well as it should. Luckily, you can fix it with systemd-networkd. 🔧

Launch your containers on Fedora CoreOS instances in Hetzner cloud with a few workarounds. 🚀

Re-use the same wildcard TLS certificate for multiple containers running behind traefik. 🚦

Build images for AWS and deploy them to your AWS account all within GitHub Actions. 🤖

Use the new DHCPv6 prefix delegation features in systemd-networkd to make IPv6 subnetting easy! 🎉

Firefox allows you to set dark mode as the default without changing themes or changing your desktop configuration. 😎

Enable tap-to-click on your laptop’s touchpad in i3 with one of two methods. 💻

Get your system tray looking great and displayed on the correct monitor with a simple script and some i3 configuration. 📥

Improve your persuasive skills to get your team on board with solutions to tough problems. 🤔

Run rootless Linux containers without any daemons using docker-compose and podman on Fedora! 📦

icanhazip.com lives on with the same mission, but with a new owner 🤗

Emojis brighten up any message or document. 🌻 Search, select, and use emojis quickly on Linux with rofimoji. 🤗

Investing in stock or trading options is complicated, but there are plenty of free resources available to make research easier.

Feedback from my original options selling post said that the concept was too difficult to follow. Let’s use an analogy!

Monitor nearly any uninterruptible power supply (UPS) with a Raspberry Pi Zero W and HomeAssistant

You did your research and made a great options trade, but now it is a losing trade. What can you do now?

Not all stock brokerages are the same. Think about your requirements, shop around, and read the fine print.

Taking the leap and selling your first options contract takes a lot of thought and preparation.

Learn from my successes and mistakes while selling puts in the stock market in 2020.

Knowing your maximum amount of loss on trade is the difference between taking a calculated risk and blowing up your account.

Selling options puts you on the other side of the options contract from buyers, but it comes with obligations.

Trading options contracts feels incredibly daunting, but you can learn the terminology and make good choices in the market.

Build a customized image for AWS with Image Builder and use the built-in automatic uploader and importer.

Moving to the keto lifestyle is a big change. It’s more than just a diet and I’ll share my ups and downs from my journey.

Making an effort to use diacritics is always a good idea, but how can you make it easier in Linux?

Brno is a beautiful city in the Czech Republic. Learn some travel tips from my experiences as an American in Brno!

The Lenovo ThinkPad T490 is a great laptop, but it comes with some discrete GPU challenges.

Fedora 17’s code name was Beefy Miracle and it had a great mascot. You can see it at boot time with a few quick changes.

My new T490 with a 10th generation Intel CPU and a discrete NVIDIA MX250 has arrived! Installing Linux creates some interesting challenges.

Openshift (and Kubernetes) allow you to run jobs on schedule, but these jobs can fail from time to time. You can monitor them from bash!

Monitor the power consumption of your CyberPower UPS and display the live output in your Linux desktop’s status bar.

Lower your CPU usage and increase battery life when you watch certain videos by using Chromium with VAAPI support.

All of your GNOME and gtk applications are configured in i3 with a few simple tricks.

Monit is a tried-and-true monitoring daemon that is easy to deploy. Add it to OpenShift to make monitoring even easier.

Many cloud providers give you lots of memory with each instance and you can speed up tests and builds by using a ramdisk.

Buildah and podman work well with the vfs storage driver, but the default mount options can cause problems.

Fedora 30 is a great Linux distribution for cloud platforms, but it needs a little work to perform well on Google Compute Engine.

Another Texas Linux Fest has come and gone!

My team at Red Hat depends heavily on GitLab CI and we build containers often to run all kinds of tests.

My team at Red Hat builds a lot of kernels in OpenShift pods as part of our work with the Continuous Kernel Integration (CKI) project.

My work at Red Hat involves testing lots and lots of kernels from various sources and we use GitLab CE to manage many of our repositories and run our CI jobs.

After writing my last post on my IPv6 woes with my Pixel 3, some readers asked how I’m handling IPv6 on my router lately.

We have two Google Pixel phones in our house: a Pixel 2 and a Pixel 3.

I recently picked up a Dell Optiplex 7060 and I’m using it as my main workstation now.

The i3 window manager is a fast window manager that helps you keep all of your applications in the right place.

DevConf.CZ 2019 wrapped up last weekend and it was a great event packed with lots of knowledgeable speakers, an engaging hallway track, and delicious food.

Fedora 29 now has kernel 4.

The Home Assistant project provides a great open source way to get started with home automtion that can be entirely self-contained within your home.

Managing iptables gets a lot easier with firewalld.

Firefox has some great features, but one of my favorites is the ability to disable autoplay for videos.

Repeaters are a great way to get into ham radio, but they can be tricky to use for new amateur radio operators. This post explains how to get started.

Environment variables are easy to add to OpenShift deployments, but a more secure way to add these variables is by referencing a secret.

I’m at the 2018 Red Hat Summit this week in San Francisco and I am enjoying the interactions between developers, executives, vendors, and engineers.

Walt Disney said it best:

If you’re on the latest Fedora release, you’re already running lots of modern packages.

The Overland Expo in Asheville last year was a great event, and one of my favorite sessions covered the basics about radio communications while overlanding.

After a recent OpenStack-Ansible (OSA) deployment on CentOS, I found that keepalived was not starting properly at boot time:

The latest release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) was published last week.

I’ve been working through some patches to OpenStack-Ansible lately to optimize how we configure yum repositories in our deployments.

Thunderbird is a great choice for a mail client on Linux systems if you prefer a GUI, but I had some problems with fonts in the most recent releases.

I have a CyberPower BRG1350AVRLCD at home and I’ve just connected it to a new device.

Tons of improvements made their way into the ansible-hardening role in preparation for the OpenStack Pike release next month.

Thunderbird can connect to an LDAP server and autocomplete email addresses as you type, but it needs some adjustment for some LDAP servers.

The interest in the openstack-ansible-security role has taken off faster than I expected, and one piece of constant feedback I received was around the name of the role.

I merged some initial Debian support into the openstack-ansible-security role and ran into an issue enabling AppArmor.

I opened up a noVNC console to a virtual machine today in my OpenStack cloud but found that the console wouldn’t take keyboard input.

The OpenStack Summit wrapped up today in Boston and it was a great week!