nixos custom ppd printer
I have bought a Brother MFC-L3780CDW printer, and needed to get it working on NixOS. While NixOS supports many Brother printers out of the box, I was unable to get the colour & duplex printing working together with any of the ones I tried. In the past I’ve used a Brother supplied .deb package on Debian based systems. This post describes how to install a PPD driver for this printer, but you can use this procedure with other printers.
nixos Fooocus
I had Fooocus running on Debian, and I recall it was not trivial to setup. I am now running NixOS, and wanted to run it again to enhance some images. Here is how to run dockerized Fooocus app on NixOS (or anywhere, really).
nixos package overlay
I’m running NixOS as my desktop, and I want to include a package, that is now newer in git than what’s published with the stable release of NixOS (25.04). This can be done with overlays.
mtr braille graph
I often monitor network stability with mtr, which can show a time series of how the network is doing at different hops between two endpoints. I recently made an improvement to mtr that shows the time series as a graph using braille characters.
blogging reborn
again # This seems to happen often. I go through a consistent burst of blogging, then I get distracted by work, and stop. Well here is another attempt at blogging. This time with hugo.
generating ssh keys in 2025
I’m setting up a new system, and I always create a new key when I bulid a new desktop… Having not done it in a few years, I wanted to see what the recomended ssh key looks like these days.
new git learnings
watching the founder of github talk about git. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aolI_Rz0ZqY here is what I learned:
new vim config
I started from scratch and built up a new Neovim config. Based on this video series: video by typecraft (thank you) Pushed to github here: https://github.com/bartman/nvim-config
improving find -exec efficiency
So today I learned about find -exec ... +
automount mmcblk devices
I put my camera SD/HC card into my laptop (running Debian/testing) and it didn’t mount. Usually I would just run the mount command to get it going: dmesg | tail mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt That unfortunately has some annoyances and I decided to solve this finally.