Blog Posts on chromic

Containers are great

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I ran into an issue on one of my system-containers earlier today:

apk Unable to lock database: Resource temporarily unavailable

I thought about troubleshooting the issue but decided this time around to take advantage of the disposable nature of containers and delete the problematic container and rebuild it.

The problem went away.

Great.

Except there’s a part of me that really doesn’t like the fact that I didn’t learn anything from the situation.

logbookd

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today I learned about logbookd while lurking in the #postmarketos IRC channel.

To quote the Alpine Linux wiki:

logbookd is a syslogd implementation that uses an sqlite database as a backend.

The wiki also links to an interesting article about its background.

Random Search Engine in qutebrowser

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I usually post things when I’m done, or reached a decent point, with whatever I’m doing. This time though I’m only halfway there but figure I’d post anyway.

Over time, I’ve been stumbling across different search engines. I take note of them, intend to try them out, but inevitably end up using the same one out of muscle memory.

I thought it might be interesting if I could have my browser choose a random search engine out of a list for every web search I do.

newsboat bookmarks integration with qutebrowser

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m playing with the idea of having my `newsboat` bookmarks automatically added to `qutebrowser`.

Maybe “integration” is a bit of a strong word for what it does, but time will tell where this goes.

Basically I added the following as my newsboat `bookmark-cmd`:

~/.config/newsboat/config

bookmark-cmd "sh -c 'echo ${@} >> /opt/bookmarks/urls' -s"

It simply adds the bookmarked article to qutebrowser’s “bookmarks/urls” file. Normally you’d want to write to “~/.config/qutebrowser/bookmarks/urls”, but I have this at another location for …reasons.

git pull --autostash

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today I learned about the --autostash switch for git-pull:

Automatically create a temporary stash entry before the operation begins, record it in the ref MERGE_AUTOSTASH and apply it after the operation ends. This means that you can run the operation on a dirty worktree. However, use with care: the final stash application after a successful merge might result in non-trivial conflicts.

EdgeRouter ER-X Firmware v3.0.1

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The following firmware versions for the Ubiquiti ER-X (and others) were released a while ago:

EdgeRouter ER-X/ER-X-SFP/EP-R6/ER-10X: Firmware v3.0.0 (2025-07-29)
EdgeRouter ER-X/ER-X-SFP/EP-R6/ER-10X: Firmware v3.0.1 (2025-10-30)

For whatever reason the Web interface of my ER-X running v2.0.9-hotfix.7 (2023-08-01) did not notify me and kept showing as “Up to date”.

In any case, I’ve upgraded today and so far things seem to have gone smoothly. I’m particularly interested in possibly replacing my IPSec site-to-site tunnel with WireGuard site-to-site instead.

Clear /tmp at reboot on Alpine Linux

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

By default, Alpine Linux doesn’t (completely) clear the /tmp directory on reboot (unless you mount it as tmpfs). If you would like to enable this feature, change “wipe_tmp” to “YES”:

/etc/conf.d/bootmisc

# List of /tmp directories we should clean up
clean_tmp_dirs="/tmp"

# Should we wipe the tmp paths completely or just selectively remove known
# locks / files / etc... ?
wipe_tmp="YES"

The train-of-thought that led me there was:

Why does it take so long to take a snapshot of my `signal-desktop` container?

# Check snapshot sizes
root@xps:~# du -chs /var/lib/incus/storage-pools/default/containers-snapshots/signal/*
9.1G	/var/lib/incus/storage-pools/default/containers-snapshots/signal/pre-patch-2026-02-01T19.54
9.1G	/var/lib/incus/storage-pools/default/containers-snapshots/signal/pre-patch-2026-02-02T15.28
18.1G	total

Wow. That doesn’t seem right.

root@signal:~# du -chs /*
...
7.8G	/tmp
...

Huh…?

root@signal:~# ls -lhaS /tmp
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root       15.4M Jan 19 20:38 .org.chromium.Chromium.BCGOJo
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root       15.4M Jan 29 15:36 .org.chromium.Chromium.BFhFGo
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root       15.4M Jan 25 09:46 .org.chromium.Chromium.FKJadh
...
...

Hrm.

root@signal:~# ls /tmp/.org.chromium.Chromium.* | wc -l
1276

Sigh…

Search the web for “.org.chromium.Chromium”
electron/electron/issues/16097 shows up:
I have a suspicion that this happens to Electron apps, which package native modules into app.asar instead of app.asar.unpacked/node_modules/
Okay, let’s check Alpine Linux’s APKBUILD for signal-desktop
Oh, this package has a README with its APKBUILD:
…
Signal-desktop is an electron application that is rather complex to build
…
Alright, I don’t have time for this right now. Let’s just treat the symptoms.

aerc, gpg and pinentry

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re getting an error like “Screen or window too small” while trying to use gpg (ex: `gpg --import ./private.key`), one way to fix it might be to instruct gpg to use “pinentry-tty”

~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf

pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-tty

Note that you might need to install pinentry-tty.

If you’re getting “failed to parse messagedetails: FAILURE sign” when aerc tries to sign a message, you might need to tell aerc to use terminal pinentry:

~/.config/aerc/aerc.conf

[general]
use-terminal-pinentry=true

Real IP when nginx, darkhttpd are behind HAProxy

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I use HAProxy as an entry point for most of the traffic hitting this server. Past that, I either have nginx fronting dynamic applications, or darkhttpd fronting static sites (such as this blog). This means that, unless configured otherwise, client IP addresses are known by HAProxy but applications behind it see all traffic coming from the HAProxy instance’s IP address.

HAProxy

One way you can expose the client’s IP address to the applications is using HAProxy’s “forwardfor” directive:

OpenRC zap

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t remember how I stumbled on this, but today I learned about the `zap` OpenRC command.

From the OpenRC User Guide:

There is a special command zap that makes OpenRC ‘forget’ that a service is started; this is mostly useful to reset a crashed service to stopped state without invoking the (possibly broken) stop function of the service script.

The Gentoo wiki has a usage example:

root # rc-service docker status
 * status: crashed
root # rc-service docker start
 * WARNING: docker has already been started
root # rc-service docker stop
 * Caching service dependencies ...       [ ok ]
 * Stopping docker ...
 * Failed to stop docker                  [ !! ]
 * ERROR: docker failed to stop
# To remedy this situation, zap the service
root # rc-service docker zap

Automatically Pushing pet Snippets to an Existing git Repository

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I recently started using `pet` as a snippet manager (thanks to Thiago Perrotta’s excellent blog post).

It stores the snippets to a text file (`~/.config/pet/snippet.toml` by default) which makes it easy to copy/sync/version/etc. It natively supports synchronizing the snippet file as a GitHub Gist or GitLab Snippet (manually or automatically).

I’m already keeping my dotfiles in a git repo, however, and would like to keep my snippet.toml file in the same spot as everything else. I also don’t want to have to remember to manually push the changes every time I add/delete/edit something.

Chic 'N' Stu

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My “go-to” gas station (i.e.: the one’s that’s most conveniently located for me) started showing advertisement videos on the small monitors built-in the gas pumps.

They are too loud and the audio is of terrible quality.

It is no longer my go-to gas station.

"what a splendid pie."

Too Slow

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 23:47:12 +0000

I almost sent a patch to gitsrht since I noticed multiline selection on blobs (ex: link to line #4 in a file and highlight the next 11 lines) was broken on my instance while writing a blog post today, but Simon was faster than me by about a day.

Just as well since it probably would’ve taken me a while to figure out patches via email, potentially wasting other people’s time pointing out my inevitable blunders :).

Auto-build APK when upstream APKBUILD changes

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

I have a custom APKBUILD (hugo-nodeploy) and I want to automatically re-build it when the upstream APKBUILD (hugo) changes. Skip to the Detect APKBUILD version mismatch section if you don’t care about the context.

Ramblings

I recently noticed something new in `hugo build` output:

Start building sites …
hugo v0.152.2+extended+withdeploy

I’m referring to the “+withdeploy” part. I never noticed that before, got curious, and looked it up.

The change in the “hugo” Alpine Linux package happened on June 12th. It probably appeared on my end when I upgraded to Alpine 3.23. The Alpine commit message refers to hugo release v0.137.0 and PR #12995 in the upstream repo, which mentions issue #12994 for context.

update-conf

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I recently integrated `update-conf` (from the alpine-conf package) in my `apk upgrade` workflow.

I already had a terribly named `uh` alias (short for “update host”, in contrast to my other alias `uc` which is short for “update containers”). This alias would run `apk upgrade` and then re-run my “updates” block for shuibar so that I get fresh data in my status bar.

I converted the `uh` alias to a function, which checks for the presence of .apk-new files with `update-conf`. If any are found, the function exits showing me a list of files that need review.

Location Tracking

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been tracking my location for a while (around Feb, 2018, apparently). I use my location to populate some of my shuibar blocks such as weather.sh, location.sh, as well as automatically update my laptop’s timezone based on where I am. I’ve been doing so with a self-hosted instance of μlogger-server and its Android app μlogger-android.

At the moment, I have a continuous running “track” since August, 2023. Although continuous logging is probably not the application’s intended main use-case, it’s been pretty rock-solid ever since I first set it up. Most of the time I don’t even remember I have this running. As such, I haven’t really looked into alternatives, until I randomly stumbled on Reitti earlier this year, which I’m planning on testing out once the holidays are over.

Create an "Unread" RSS Feed Group with newsboat

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using newsboat as my RSS Reader for a while now and I am really liking it. Although I realized recently that one thing I was missing from it was the ability to have a single “Unread” group containing all unread articles from all the different RSS feeds I’m subscribed to.

By default, newsboat shows you the list of your feeds along with an “Unread/Total” article count. I’ve used it this way for a long time but recently I caught myself loading newsboat, but then turning to my phone to read articles via miniflux’s progressive web app (PWA).

Incus alpine/3.23

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Alpine Linux 3.23.0 Incus images have been released.

Alpine Linux 3.23.0

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Alpine Linux 3.23.0 has been released.

Reusing my old phone as a universal remote

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over the years, I’ve ended up with a bunch of small infrared remotes for various things. I also had an old¹ Samsung Galaxy S5, which has an infrared transmitter, sitting in a storage bin in the basement. I decided to look into consolidating the various IR remotes into virtual remotes via the Android phone.

Capturing the IR signals

Hardware

Some years ago, I bought a TSOP38238 IR receiver to use with my raspberrypi. I don’t remember why I got this back then, but that’s what I used to capture the IR signals from the remotes this time around.

wsl-vpnkit

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A recent update to our VPN client at work broke networking in WSL2. Thankfully, recently I learned about wsl-vpnkit, which fixed the issue,

mode2 partial read

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Once you have dtoverlay working for your infrared reciever, if you run mode2 to capture signal but run into “Partial read 12 bytes” (where the number may differ), you may need to switch from the “devinput” driver to the “default” driver.

For example, on the command-line:

k3rnel-pan1c:~$ mode2 --driver default --device /dev/lirc0

Thanks to Ingo on stackoverflow for the hint.

dtoverlay is also a command

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today I learned that “dtoverlay” is not only a property of the raspberrypi’s config.txt file, but also a command that can be run after bootup.

I was trying to get my raspberrypi (running Alpine Linux) to recognize my TSOP38238 IR receiver, but adding “dtoverlay=gpio-ir,gpio_pin=18” to the following files did not work:

/boot/usercfg.txt
/boot/config.txt
/boot/firmware/config.txt

Running the following command after booting up does make /dev/lirc0 appear, however:

k3rnel-pan1c:~$ doas dtoverlay gpio-ir,gpio_pin=18

Which is fine for my purposes since I only need the device to be present once in a while, not on every boot.

Free Upgrade

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My OVH VPS recently got upgraded at no cost:

dyndns Server for Linode and OVH APIs

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 20:38:12 +0000

A while ago (almost two years ago, according to the git logs), I wrote a rough dyndns2 server compatible with the Linode Domains API so that my EdgeRouter X could update the domain name pointing to my home IP address automatically.

More recently, due to some concerns I moved from Linode to OVH.

As the title of this post suggests, I’ve updated the code to support either Linode or OVH as the DNS provider.

rtl ping-pong

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 19:57:12 +0000

A while ago, I got a Nooelec NESDR Mini SDR & DVB-T USB Stick (RTL2832 + R820T) w/ Antenna to tap into the “Itron 100WRD Automated Meter Reading (AMR) module” attached to my house so I could see my water usage in near real-time.

More recently, I got an “Inkbird Remote Pool Thermometer Set (IBS-P01R)”. Of course, I needed to know if I could use my trusty SDR receiver to gather data from it too.

wsl2

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:38:12 +0000

I have to use Windows at work, so naturally I try to do as much as possible in WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). These are a few things a learned about WSL v2 recently:

Alpine, Busybox login, and PAM

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 12:31:44 +0000

I recently learned that the busybox build on Alpine Linux does not include support for PAM.

Alpine Linux, Arch Linux and Void Linux package manager Rosetta

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:22:49 +0000

I used Arch Linux for several years and I know its package manager (pacman) fairly well. These days, I mostly use Alpine Linux along with one server running Void Linux. Sometimes, I know how to do something with pacman (ex: find which package owns a certain file), but I’m not sure how to do that thing in one of the other distros.

Inspired by Archlinux’s Pacman Rosetta wiki page, I’ve jotted down some equivalent commands between the three package managers for things I do somewhat frequently. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list and only shows one way of doing things (only the short flags, for example).

I might add more things over time if I find myself running in other use-cases often.

Task Management

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 20:36:02 +0000

A quick post about the applications I use for my TODO lists.

Hairpin NAT With nftables

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 24 May 2025 12:18:54 +0000

This is a short post about how I ended up implementing NAT hairpinning with nftables so that my Incus containers could talk to my other containers through their publicly accessible domains (in other words: “container to host to container”). All thanks to a helpful StackExchange post.

Prevent dhcpcd From Modifying resolv.conf

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 21:45:30 +0000

If you’d like dhcpcd to leave your /etc/resolv.conf configurations alone, add the following to /etc/dhcpcd.conf:

nohook resolv.conf

Indieweb Likes With Hugo and Xray

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 20:56:33 +0000

I recently added a “likes” section to this blog. This post explains my current workflow when creating a “like”.

Import Ecobee Data in InfluxDB

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 23:32:49 +0000

This post is a note-to-self about how I imported my ecobee data into InfluxDB.

Moved

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 21:28:09 +0000

Since yesterday, the Linode VPS has been shutdown and all services are now running on OVH.

Notifications on successful SSH logins

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A long time ago, I setup mail notifications when a successful SSH login happens on Linode. While switching over to OVH, I realized I never really documented this anywhere. So here’s another note-to-self post.

HAProxy Cannot Raise FD Limit in Incus on Void Linux

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I ran into a “cannot raise FD limit” error when starting HAProxy after migrating from Archlinux to Void Linux. This post describes how I managed to get around that.

Singleplexing

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using “tmux” as a terminal multiplexer for years (decades? I’m getting old; I lose track). I’m starting an experiment to go without it for local shells (i.e.: I’ll still use tmux on machines I ssh into). Mostly for fun, but also it would be one less thing to rely on.

Moving

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Following in the footsteps of others, I am reducing my dependence on US companies. As a result, I’m slowly moving my workloads from Linode to OVH (a company from France). Since I’m in Canada and OVH has datacenters here, choosing a server located in my country seemed to make sense.

Thanks to all the maintainers

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this post, I want to take some time to express my gratitude to everyone involved in F(L)OSS communities out there.

Copying URLs with foot Terminal

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today I learned that with Control+Shift+o in foot, you:

"Enter URL mode, where all currently visible URLs are tagged with a jump label with a key sequence that will open the URL (and exit URL mode)."

systemd Dynamic Users

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I really didn’t want to dislike systemd. I don’t want to join the systemd-bashing “movement” (regardless of whether the bashing is deserved or not). systemd is making that very difficult though.

Incus Volume Usage Graph

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A random idea crossed my mind yesterday: create a graph of which volume is used by which Incus container. So I spent a little time messing around creating a silly script that generates a .dot file to visualize that.

h-recipe

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, I revamped how the “recipe” section on here is laid out.

humans.txt

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

And of course updating my security.txt file reminded me of the humans.txt initiative.

security.txt

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago (Jun, 2019 according to git-log) I added .well-known/security.txt to this blog. When re-visiting WKD, it reminded me of its existence and I checked to see if anything about the proposed standard had changed since then.

WKD

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recently re-learned about Web Key Service (WKS) and Web Key Directory (WKD). I opted to host a static version of WKD, which is essentially just placing text files in a specific directory.

Dynamically removing a known nft rule

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have the creation and configuration of my Incus containers automated. This includes configuring nftables. On Alpine Linux, this typically just means adding a rule to allow traffic from an IP/range on a specific port. On Archlinux, however, a built-in rule was giving me trouble so I needed to get rid of it programatically.

Fixing "idmaps of container and storage volume are not identical"

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If, for whatever reason, you’re in a situation where a volume cannot be added to a container with an error message similar to: “idmaps of container <container-name> and storage volume <volume-name> are not identical”, you might need to run the following:

nftables on Alpine Linux vs. Archlinux

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

One thing I forgot about regarding the Archlinux “nftables” systemd unit file, is that stopping the nftables service doesn’t flush the ruleset. If you want the rules gone, you need to run “nft flush ruleset”.

ytdl:// URLs

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today I learned about how you can pass a “yt-dlp” URL (with format “ytdl://<video-id>”) to “mpv” and it’ll play the relevant YouTube video.

The samp HTML Element

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today I learned about the <samp> HTML element, and how it differs from the <output> element.

jq, yq, yx, xq

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is one of those times where I did a search, which yielded an unexpected but interesting result, which led me to a CLI tool, which led me to another CLI tool... It's almost like the web is built on links, or something.

Flashing postmarketOS on a Samsung gtexswifi Device from an Incus VM

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

With my Incus VM running Alpine Linux up and running, I was able to install pmbootstrap and build the environment to flash the Samsung Galaxy Tab A 7.0 - SM-T280 (gtexswifi) device.

Launch Incus VM with Custom root Partition Size

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is “part 3” of the Virtual Machines with Incus on an Alpine Linux Host blog post saga. In this post we’ll have a look at what I needed to do to resize the root partition of the VM that was created in part 1.

Reset Incus VM root Password Without incus-agent

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is “part 2” of the Virtual Machines with Incus on an Alpine Linux Host blog post saga. In this blog post, we find a way to access the VM when the incus-agent isn’t running.

Virtual Machines with Incus on an Alpine Linux Host

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Before now, I’d only ever used Incus to run containers. I ran into a situation where I needed a virtual machine (VM) instead (more on that in a later post). This post documents my experience setting that up on an Alpine Linux host.

DNmesS

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 02:32:24 +0000

A post about the current state of my DNS infrastructure. Once again acting as a reminder of how my own things work, because I need to re-learn it every eight months or so when troubleshooting something.

Integrating khard and aerc Incus Containers

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This post explains how I currently have khard and aerc running in separate Incus containers, while having aerc being able to lookup contacts via khard. It’s nothing revolutionary, and I’m sure there are better ways, but it’s the first thing I thought of, and it works (spoilers: it’s SSH).

Adding Blocks to Shuibar

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago (checks git history, around August, 2023), I started working on a custom statusbar for the swaywm. As with most things I write, I don’t necessarily recommend people use this; it’s mostly there for me to learn about different things and to scratch my own itch type-of-thing. Last week, I added a simple block to it and I’m just really enjoying how easy it was to add that functionality in.

No Car, No Tv, No Internet

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday evening wasn't supposed to be much different than any other Tuesday evening: pass by groceries after work, have dinner, cleanup & a few chores, catch-up with what's been happening on the internet, maybe watch a couple of episodes of some show... Except that a couple of things turned it into a situation where I had no car, no internet and no Tv signal. Note that I'm not complaining; these things are luxuries. It was just unexpected, is all.

Custom "!Bangs" in qutebrowser

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I've been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for a while now (recently moved to the lite version). One thing I like about it is the !bang feature. Unfortunately, you can't customize or add your own without submitting them to DuckDuckGo for review and approval, so I looked into how to achieve this with qutebrowser instead.

Qutebrowser Interceptors

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I'm using qutebrowser as my daily-driver to browse the web. In my configs, I have interceptors to redirect "(www.)reddit.com" requests to "old.reddit.com" since I find the old interface much more usable. I wanted to add something similar for youtube, but ran into some issues.

Unsophisticated Alerts on Container Update Failures

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of days ago, I mentioned:

[...]one thing I want to add now is error reporting for those unattended, scheduled upgrades. For this particular case, it would be as simple as flagging when `apk upgrade` returns a failure.

Not sure if this is worth a blog post but for now, I'm just sending myself email notifications via msmtp's `sendmail` implementation.

Add Timestamps to bash History

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It turns out it's pretty easy to add timestamps to bash's `history` shell built-in. Add the following in your .bashrc:

HISTTIMEFORMAT="%F %T "

Reference.

Application Disaster Recovery with Incus Containers

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, one of my self-hosted services suffered a partial upgrade failure. These are the steps I followed to get back to a working version, then troubleshoot the issue.

Set a user's password non-interactively

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today I ran into a use-case where I needed to set a Linux user’s password via script, non-interactively. I don’t think this is something I’ve had to do in the past, and so I learned about the chpasswd utility.

Let's Go

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is a short tale about my first interactions with the Go language.

Writing

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I decided to try to blog more frequently. I’d like to keep that up long-term. We’ll see if that pans-out, but I think I have to try shifting how I approach writing for that to happen.

BOM and Python

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: Decode data with “utf-8-sig” to handle files that may or may not be encoded with BOM.

My Software Stack

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is a blog post similar to My Android Stack, except for my daily-driver machine: a Dell XPS laptop running Alpine Linux. Most of those tools run in their own Incus container, because why not.

nextcloud-upgrade OpenRC Service

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Service

My Incus containers upgrade automatically on a schedule. This has been running fine for a couple of years now, except that Nextcloud has the annoying habit of presenting a “click here to upgrade” interstitial page instead of, you know, just doing the upgrade.

There might be a way to tell Nextcloud to apply the upgrade automatically, but in a pinch I just wrote an OpenRC service that runs occ upgrade at bootup after the “nextcloud” service starts.

Airy Tooth

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This is an update to my previous blog post "Weathered Radio" from five years ago.

I now pull data from an AirThings WavePlus sensor with my old RaspberryPi 2B via Bluetooth and send it to a self-hosted InfluxDB instance.

List the Current Page's RSS Feeds with qutebrowser

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a “userscript” for qutebrowser that lists current page’s RSS feeds: list_rss.py.

The code is heavily based on the openfeeds userscript that ships with qutebrowser.

Instead of opening one tab per RSS feed, containing the XML of the RSS feed itself, list_rss.py opens a single tab with the URLs of the RSS feeds it found separated by newlines.

That is all.

Plot git-commits on a Graph with gnuplot

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

After going down some Internet rabbit hole, as one does, I somehow ended up on a dillo browser blog post. The blog post is interesting on its own, and something that caught my eye was their graph of git-commits over time, made with gnuplot.

Stale APKBUILDs Detection

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a script to detect when my APKBUILDs need to be sync’ed with upstream. Then, I hooked it up to my custom swaybar to be notified.

Migrating from LXD to Incus on Alpine Linux

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 22 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Another day, another migration.

Migrating from GitHub to Codeberg

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 15 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Some scripts I quickly wrote to copy my GitHub repositories over to Codeberg.

Recovering From a Full btrfs Disk

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 11 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Jotting down the steps I took (found) to recover from a full (or “metadata full”) btrfs disk.

Containers? On MY machine?

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“It’s more likely than you think."

This is another post about different things I’ve been messing around with over the years, coming together and merging into what became my day-to-day machine.

Dualbooting Alpine Linux on Dell XPS

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A while back, I got a Dell XPS machine that came with Ubuntu preinstalled. I’ve been running Arch Linux on most of my machine for several years now, so decided to install Arch Linux alongside Ubuntu.

Fastforward a few years: I’ve been interfacing more and more with Alpine Linux lately and want to try it as a daily distro for a bit, so I’ve decided to replace the Arch Linux install on the XPS with Alpine.

Transcoding and Streaming with ffmpeg

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Another note-to-self to document the commands I’m using to transcode video files from the desktop and stream it to the raspberrypi.

DVD DRM and Regions

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sun, 29 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A quick note-to-self regarding DVD drives and regions.

HAProxy Traffic Logs with GoAccess

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 22 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

HAProxy is essentially the entry-point for most of the services I run. Its logs are sent to a central rsyslog container on a volume that’s accessible by the GoAccess container for parsing. I found most of the configs here.

Switching LXD Storage Pools

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Short post so I remember how I moved my containers from a “dir” storage pool to btrfs.

vim

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Documenting my vim setup and plugins I’m using. It’s pretty underwhelming, but I’m jotting this down here so I can keep track of how it evolves over time.

vaultwarden

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome, vaultwarden, to the list of things I’m hosting.

Migrating Gitea's Database from MariaDB to PostgreSQL

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t have anything against MariaDB, and had no problems with it being the database for Gitea. Everything else I have runs on PostgreSQL though so I figured I’d migrate Gitea over to PostgreSQL and be able to free-up some resources by getting rid of the MariaDB container I had running.

LXD Patching Strategy

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This post describes the way I handle patching with LXD. Nothing too fancy or complicated. Should be good-enough for a hobby. Time will tell.

LXD Backup Strategy

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This post describes the way I handle backups with LXD. Nothing too fancy or complicated. Should be good-enough for a hobby. Time will tell.

k3rnel-pan1c

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hello, friend.

Long time no see.

I’m not good with introductions so let’s just dive into it.

shutdown -r

Things I've done since Apr. 27 2020:

Shut everything down except critical services.
The resources I kept running are:
- mail (postfix et al.) and webmail (mail.chromic.org)
  Last line of communication with the world. Mostly to get reminders about domain expiry, etc.
- code.chromic.org
  On the off-chance my crappy code is of interest to anyone.
- files.chromic.org
  For file storage.
Except for work, stopped doing much of anything computer-related. No development and no sysadmin stuff except `pacman -Syu`.
Stopped initiating contact with people.
Turned off most phone notifications.

It took a while, but eventually things got really quiet. Things got simpler, and I felt like I could focus.

Weathered Chimo

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

So I haven’t been on here for a while, huh?

For the most part, I haven’t touched this whole “*.chromic.org” environment since my last post in September. I don’t think this post is indicative of a “return to a regular schedule”.

So what am I doing here then? I found a draft post I’d started almost a year ago, around the time I was messing with weather data and wrote the Weathered Radio post. I figured I’d get it done and, who knows, maybe I’m wrong and I’ll start posting more. So let’s cut the crap and get to it, shall we?

The Road to GTFS

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Pretty much every blog post here relates to Project Autonomous in a way or another. This blog post does as well. This time, I’m telling the story of how gtfs.chromic.org came about.

Gitea, Drone CI, Hugo and Auto-deployment

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This is an update to my previous blog post "Git, Gogs, Jekyll and Auto-deployment" since I've changed things up in the last four years.

Weathered Radio

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This setup was superseded by Airy Tooth.

A while ago, I wrote about listening-in to our wireless water meter with a USB SDR. A while after that, we received a weather station that includes a wireless sensor to measure the weather outside:

With the excellent rtl_433 utility, it was quite easy to get a reading off of the wireless sensor. The following script will launch `rtl_433` for 30 seconds and output the readings in JSON format. We then use `jq` to select only the readings specific to our sensor by filtering by sensor id (there are a couple other wireless sensors around it seems), keep only the last reading, do some calibration with `jq` again and write the final JSON to a file. I then point nginx to that file, serve it with a 'application/json' Content-Type and boom: local weather accessible remotely. Why? No idea, but it's kind of neat.

Mail

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 05 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Once again, I’m just documenting part of my setup. It’s nothing that hasn’t been done before (it’s just a collection of different utilities, barely deviating from the out-of-the-box configuration, really). This time, we’re talking about mail.

Tripping on LXD

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 29 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Don’t mind me; I’m just jotting down a couple of issues I ran into while messing around with LXD.

Trying Wayland

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t particularly dislike X11. I’ve used it for years, it did a pretty good job of getting out of the way, and most of the time I’m not really thinking about it.

I’ve been stumbling on more and more articles and mentions about Wayland, however, and so I’ve decided to try to use Wayland, and applications running on Wayland exclusively. For this experiment, I consider XWayland cheating, so I disabled it in my Sway configs.

Aqueous Radio

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Automated Meter Reading (AMR) module

“I wonder what that thing is…"
Is what I thought when I saw the “thing” in the picture above stuck to our house when we moved in almost four years ago. I then promptly forgot about it as I got busy with other things.

Last summer however, I was walking around the expanding neighborhood near construction sites. I must’ve been in a particularly inquisitive mood and my eyes happened to focus on one of those “things” on another house. I decided that the mystery needed to be solved so I walked back home and did a bit of research (fancy way of saying I ran two or three web searches).

Running youtube-dl on Android via Termux

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I recently got youtube-dl working on LineageOS nightly via Termux. Here are the steps I took:

Transferred

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Tue, 04 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve transferred the chromic.org domain from Dreamhost to Hover. Mostly because of UI/UX reasons.

Renewed

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sat, 04 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I just renewed the chromic.org domain for another two years:

Boop! Renewed chromic.org. You guys are stuck with me for at least another two years.

The act of renewing the domain kind of felt like the beginning of a new year, somehow. A good time to reflect on what I’ve done with the domain since last time I renewed it, to think about where it’s going, what the future projects are.

I’m not going to lay down plans for the next two years in this post because frankly, I haven’t thought about it that far ahead. But I can try to give an overview of the plans I have for the near-future. Maybe publishing those plans here is going to give me a reason to get to them faster than I normally would.

Lifestream Architecture

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Mon, 15 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, the homepage of this blog changed from a static list of recent blog posts to a realtime stream of updates (the list of blog posts is still there, moved to the sidebar). This post tries to document (mostly as a “note-to-self”, again) how this “lifestream” works.

Note: This is a work-in-progress; I’ve already got plans to tweak how some of the pieces fit together.

Git, Gogs, Jekyll and Auto-deployment

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Wed, 13 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This setup was superseded by Gitea, Drone CI, Hugo and Auto-deployment.

Since yesterday, this blog deploys automatically when I push changes to its git repository. Before that, my workflow was something like:

My Android Stack

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Sun, 11 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Apps

AntennaPod: Podcast Player
DAVdroid: Contacts (CardDAV) and Calendar (CalDAV) sync.
I have it sync with my Nextcloud instance.
F-Droid: Catalogue of FOSS applications for the Android platform
FreeOTP: Two-factor authenticator
K-9 Mail: Email client
Supports PGP via APG or OpenKeychain.
Kore: Remote control for Kodi — Open Source Home Theatre
I run Kodi on my Raspberry Pi.
NewPipe: Lightweight YouTube frontend. I like the fact that you can send videos to Kodi through Kore
OpenKeychain: Manage OpenPGP keys
Integrates with K-9 Mail
Nextcloud: View and upload files from/to my Nextcloud instance
Practice Hub: Tools for musicians, including a chromatic tuner, a metronome, and a pitch drone.
I mostly use it to help me tune my guitar.
Revolution IRC: IRC client.
I use it with ZNC.
Termux: Terminal and SSH client.
μlogger: Location tracker.
I use it with my instance of the μlogger server.

The Web and I

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

And so it Begins

I’ve always been fascinated by electronics and computers.

I remember spending countless hours messing around with one of those “Electronic Project Kits” similar to the one pictured above.

I followed every instruction in the book, went off-course and tried new things.

Project Autonomous

chimo@chromic.org (chimo) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In an effort to take control of my online presence/data and to become more autonomous, I started to migrate away from services hosted by 3rd-parties and setup my own instances where possible.

Blog Posts on chromic

Containers are great

logbookd

Random Search Engine in qutebrowser

newsboat bookmarks integration with qutebrowser

git pull --autostash

EdgeRouter ER-X Firmware v3.0.1

Clear /tmp at reboot on Alpine Linux

aerc, gpg and pinentry

Real IP when nginx, darkhttpd are behind HAProxy

HAProxy

OpenRC zap

Automatically Pushing pet Snippets to an Existing git Repository

Chic 'N' Stu

Too Slow

Auto-build APK when upstream APKBUILD changes

TL;DR

Ramblings

update-conf

Location Tracking

Create an "Unread" RSS Feed Group with newsboat

Incus alpine/3.23

Alpine Linux 3.23.0

Reusing my old phone as a universal remote

Capturing the IR signals

Hardware

wsl-vpnkit

mode2 partial read

dtoverlay is also a command

Free Upgrade

dyndns Server for Linode and OVH APIs

rtl ping-pong

wsl2

Alpine, Busybox login, and PAM

Alpine Linux, Arch Linux and Void Linux package manager Rosetta

Task Management

Hairpin NAT With nftables

Prevent dhcpcd From Modifying resolv.conf

Indieweb Likes With Hugo and Xray

Import Ecobee Data in InfluxDB

Moved

Notifications on successful SSH logins

HAProxy Cannot Raise FD Limit in Incus on Void Linux

Singleplexing

Moving

Thanks to all the maintainers

Copying URLs with foot Terminal

systemd Dynamic Users

Incus Volume Usage Graph

h-recipe

humans.txt

security.txt

WKD

Dynamically removing a known nft rule

Fixing "idmaps of container and storage volume are not identical"

nftables on Alpine Linux vs. Archlinux

ytdl:// URLs

The samp HTML Element

jq, yq, yx, xq

Flashing postmarketOS on a Samsung gtexswifi Device from an Incus VM

Launch Incus VM with Custom root Partition Size

Reset Incus VM root Password Without incus-agent

Virtual Machines with Incus on an Alpine Linux Host

DNmesS

Integrating khard and aerc Incus Containers

Adding Blocks to Shuibar

No Car, No Tv, No Internet

Custom "!Bangs" in qutebrowser

Qutebrowser Interceptors

Unsophisticated Alerts on Container Update Failures

Add Timestamps to bash History

Application Disaster Recovery with Incus Containers

Set a user's password non-interactively

Let's Go

Writing

BOM and Python

My Software Stack

Blogroll

nextcloud-upgrade OpenRC Service

Service