Nix Neovim Overlay
title # I run NixOS, my configuration is quite conservative (stable release), but I do occasionally install from unstable. Neovim v0.12 just dropped and I wanted to switch to it. NixOS has not yet updated v0.12 (not even in unstable). I wanted to build my own Neovim v0.12 using overlays…
git-wip C++ rewrite — over a decade later
Many many years ago I wrote about git-wip, a tool I created to automatically snapshot your working tree on every file save. The original was a bash script, written over a few weekends in 2009. It served me well for over a decade, but it had accumulated technical debt: the bash script had issues with whitespace in filenames, it used external tools like git-sh-setup, it was getting harder to extend, slow on large repos, and so on. A decade and a half of GitHub issues had piled up. Some were feature requests. Others were bugs. Many were just things that didn’t work on platforms that weren’t my own. I had ignored most of them — the script was good enough for me, and I didn’t really have to pull to work on it in my free time. Sorry. That changed recently.
Overcoming Windows 11 Installation Resets on Ryzen 7
I was hitting Windows 11 installer resets on an ASRock B550M Steel Legend motherboard with a AMD Ryzen 7 5700G processor. The system ran Linux stable for months and BIOS was perfectly stable also, but Windows installers (both 10 and 11) triggered resets, even while idle. It looked like a Windows-specific power management issue, likely related to CPU C-states.
NixOS molly-guard
I accidentally ran sudo reboot on my local desktop, thinking the shell was connected to a remote server over ssh. This rebooted the wrong system… Oops. On Debian for years, I used a package molly-guard, and I had installed molly-guard on my NixOS desktop, but apparently I didn’t configure it correctly.
multi user vncserver
Let’s setup an Ubuntu 24.04 Server and give multiple users to it using VNC. So, I have an Ubuntu 24.04 server in the lab, and I need to get multiple users to VNC in. Not my favourite way to use a UNIX system, but all the hardware tools are graphical, and this is the way design is done. To keep things light, we will use lightdm greeter and xfce4 desktop.
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.