chromic

Liked: Markdown Ate the World

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:11:41 +0000

Liked "Markdown Ate the World" by Mathew Duggan.

Organic Maps

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:08:58 +0000

Bookmarked "Organic Maps":

Organic Maps is a privacy-focused offline maps & GPS app for hiking, cycling, biking, and driving.

Discovered via Google Translate → Kagi Translate, DeepL by Thiago Perrotta.

hledger

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:01:47 +0000

Bookmarked "hledger":

Robust, friendly, fast, plain text accounting.

Discovered via hledger for managing money by Sufyaan.

Liked: Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:19:21 +0000

Liked "Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity" by Matheus Lima.

Liked: 406 Fail

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 22:47:25 +0000

Liked "406.fail".

Found while lurking on IRC. Gave me a few chuckles.

oembed-proxy

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:21:37 +0000

Bookmarked "oembed-proxy" by Simon Ser.

A proxy that serves oEmbed replies for arbitrary URLs.

logbookd

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.

tldr pages

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:36:04 +0000

Bookmarked "tldr pages" by tldr-pages.

Collaborative cheatsheets for console commands

via Notes on clarifying man pages by Julia Evans

prek

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:32:03 +0000

Bookmarked "prek" by j178.

Better `pre-commit`, re-engineered in Rust

via New APKBUILD: LLM edition by Thiago Perrotta

Random Search Engine in qutebrowser

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.

My attempt at implementing this consists of pointing my `qutebrowser`’s default search engine at a local HTML file, which includes JavaScript to randomly pick from a predefined list of search engines.

As of now, I’m unable to have the browser automatically redirect me to the target search engine. Doing `window.location = search_engine;` gives me an error in the lines of “Network unavailable”.

Dynamically inserting a link on the page and calling `.click()` on it has a similar behaviour.

I’m wondering if this is a limitation of the file:// protocol, but I’ve not looked it up yet, and I’ve been out of the Web game for a few years now.

As such, I’ve resorted to generating the link, and I have to click on it to get to the search results. Not the end of the world, but it would be nice if I didn’t have to.

newsboat bookmarks integration with qutebrowser

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.

At the moment, to view the bookmark via qutebrowser’s `:bookmark-list` command, qutebrowser needs to be restarted so it loads the new file contents. In an upcoming qutebrowser release a new `:bookmarks-reload` command will be available so that shouldn’t be necessary.

git pull --autostash

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

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.

Fallout S02E08: "The Strip"

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:04:39 +0000

Series: Fallout
Season: 2
Episode: 8
Episode Title: The Strip
Episode Overview: Winning might be overrated...

Fallout S02E07: "The Handoff"

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:12:06 +0000

Series: Fallout
Season: 2
Episode: 7
Episode Title: The Handoff
Episode Overview: You always end up back where you started.

Clear /tmp at reboot on Alpine Linux

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.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 20:03:00 +0000

Title: 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
Overview: Dr. Kelson finds himself in a shocking new relationship - with consequences that could change the world as they know it - and Spike's encounter with Jimmy Crystal becomes a nightmare he can't escape.

Fallout S02E06: "The Other Player"

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:18:56 +0000

Series: Fallout
Season: 2
Episode: 6
Episode Title: The Other Player
Episode Overview: I remember good people.

aerc, gpg and pinentry

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

Fallout S02E05: "The Wrangler"

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 01:43:37 +0000

Series: Fallout
Season: 2
Episode: 5
Episode Title: The Wrangler
Episode Overview: Big Whoop.

Fallout S02E04: "The Demon in the Snow"

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:41:33 +0000

Series: Fallout
Season: 2
Episode: 4
Episode Title: The Demon in the Snow
Episode Overview: Rock to spear and so on...

Real IP when nginx, darkhttpd are behind HAProxy

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:

/etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg

frontend main
    option forwardfor

This tells HAProxy to add the client’s IP address to the value of “X-Forwarded-For” HTTP Header.

Now that the information is forwarded to the rest of the stack, it can be used in the logs, for example.

nginx

For nginx, we can tell it to use the IP address in the “X-Forwarded-For” header as the client’s IP in its logs with the “real_ip_header” directive:

/etc/nginx/http.d/app.conf

location / {
    ...
    real_ip_header X-Forwarded-For;
    ...
}

darkhttpd

The next version of darkhttpd might include a `--trusted-ip` option, which tells darkhttpd to use the value of “X-Forwarded-For” as the client’s IP address if the traffic is coming from a proxy matching the “trusted-ip” value.

I tweaked the Alpine Linux darkhttpd APKBUILD and created my own darkhttpd-git package to test this out. It’s currently serving this blog and seems to work as intended:

/etc/conf.d/darkhttpd

darkhttpd_args="--trusted-ip x.x.x.x"

OpenRC zap

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

Fallout S02E03: "The Profligate"

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:32:33 +0000

Series: Fallout
Season: 2
Episode: 3
Episode Title: The Profligate
Episode Overview: Most kids are dead by this age.

Automatically Pushing pet Snippets to an Existing git Repository

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.

I run a lot of my applications in Incus containers (including `pet`) and have wrapper scripts in `~/.local/bin/` to run them.

So I modified my `pet.sh` wrapper script so that on every invocation, it:

Runs `pet` like it’s meant to be used.
Checks whether `snippet.toml` has local modifications.
If so, prompt if we want to:
1. See the diff.
2. Commit the changes.
3. Skip (do nothing).

Fallout S02E02: "The Golden Rule"

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 23:35:48 +0000

Series: Fallout
Season: 2
Episode: 2
Episode Title: The Golden Rule
Episode Overview: You can't put a price on family…

Chic 'N' Stu

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

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 :).

A couple of days ago I noticed my editor settings garbled up newlines on an email I sent. Whoops…

I should figure out why my hubsrht profile’s activity isn’t updating anymore though.

Auto-build APK when upstream APKBUILD changes

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.

In short, the new release without the “deploy” feature:

[…] shaves off about 40% of the binary size.

and, in some contexts, gets rid of:

[…] questionable network activity from Hugo

The network activity, although a little strange, doesn’t concern me too much (I’m assuming it’s benign). I also don’t really know if my setup is affected. The `hugo` binary isn’t very big to being with, so the size reduction isn’t super significant in my scenario.

So why am I writing about this if it doesn’t really matter to me? Well, I don’t use the `deploy` feature so getting rid of it has no downsides and a couple of small benefits. More importantly though, it got me to thinking: “how would I approach this if I absolutely needed to get rid of this feature?”

One obvious solution is to get the precompiled binary, but where’s the fun in that? Another solution is to build my own package, which I did. But “with custom packages comes some responsibilities”. I want to follow the `hugo` Alpine package releases as closely as possible (recompile due to Go version changes, security fixes, etc.) but just without the “withdeploy” feature. What’s the easiest way to do that?

What I came up with probably isn’t the easiest way, but I think that it’s something that’ll work for my needs, and might re-usable for other packages in the future, if need be. Basically, I want to do two distinct things:

Detect when my APKBUILD’s version doesn’t match upstream’s APKBUILD version.
Build my custom package the same way as upstream, but without “withdeploy”.

Detect APKBUILD Version Mismatch

This part relies on the fact that my custom package is deployed to my custom APK repository and accessible from the current machine (i.e.: I can do `apk search -e hugo-nodeploy`).

A heavy requirement, perhaps, but then it should make it easy to achieve our first goal: get the versions of both “hugo” and “hugo-nodeploy” via `apk search`, compare the two (in my case, with `apk version`) and see if they differ.

Build Package

If the versions don’t match, we need to build our package:

Get the upstream files.
Right now, I’m using `wget` to leverage GitLab’s feature that lets us download a specific directory from a repository.
Patch upstream’s APKBUILD with our changes.
Run `abuild checksum && abuild -r`

Running the Script

I simply dropped `check-hugo.sh` in `/etc/periodic/daily/`. We’ll see how it goes.

Liked: Introducing CSS Grid Lanes

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:45:25 +0000

Liked "Introducing CSS Grid Lanes" by webkit.org.

via ln.ht/~ddevault.

Liked: git-stash Untracked Files

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:43:08 +0000

Liked "git: stash untracked files" by Thiago Perrotta.

starship

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:38:51 +0000

Bookmarked "starship" by starship.rs.

The minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell!

via Starship by Thiago Perrotta

watchexec

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:34:39 +0000

Bookmarked "watchexec" by watchexec.

Executes commands in response to file modifications

via Who watches the watchmen? by Thiago Perrotta

update-conf

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.

Basically, I want to force myself to action .apk-new files, otherwise I cannot upgrade. I like to have my shuibar short and concise, so the constant reminder that upgrades are available will probably be enough for me to review the .apk-new files (as opposed to ignore pending updates).

I’ll let this sit for a while and see how it goes, but I’ll probably re-run update-conf after upgrades to flag new .apk-new files so that I can action them as they appear as opposed to whenever I run updates next.

Avatar: Fire and Ash

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 23:59:25 +0000

Title: Avatar: Fire and Ash
Overview: In the wake of the devastating war against the RDA and the loss of their eldest son, Jake Sully and Neytiri face a new threat on Pandora: the Ash People, a violent and power-hungry Na'vi tribe led by the ruthless Varang. Jake's family must fight for their survival and the future of Pandora in a conflict that pushes them to their emotional and physical limits.

Sisu: Road to Revenge

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 03:27:24 +0000

Title: Sisu: Road to Revenge
Overview: Returning to the house where his family was brutally murdered during the war, ‘the man who refuses to die’ dismantles it, loads it on a truck, and is determined to rebuild it somewhere safe in their honor. When the commander who killed his family comes back hellbent on finishing the job, a relentless, eye-popping cross-country chase ensues.

Location Tracking

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

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).

I paused a moment to wonder why that was and realized that since I’ve been busy/lazy/insert-excuse-here lately, the number of unread articles has been growing to the point where it was difficult to find which articles were new with newsboat. I also have the bad habit of leaving things “Unread” as a reminder to get back to them later, to make matters worse.

Finding new articles wasn’t so much a problem with miniflux since, by default, it shows you all your unread articles with the most recent ones at the top.

I did a bit of searching and it turns out you can create a “Unread” group, similar to what miniflux shows you, within newsboat.

First, add the following to your “~/.config/newsboat/urls” file (create it if it doesn’t exist):

"query:Unread Articles:unread = \"yes\""

Update: If you're using the "Starred items" special feed that some backends support and you "star" an unread article, it'll show up twice in the "Unread Articles" feed. To prevent that from happening, the following query can be used:

"query:Unread Articles:(unread = \"yes\") and (feedtitle != \"Starred items\")"

Next, if you want to see this group by default when launching newsboat, add the following to “~/.config/newsboat/config”:

run-on-startup goto-title "Unread Articles" ; open

Done! You can get back to newsboat’s default view of all your individual feeds by pressing ‘q’.

One habit I’m planning on changing though is using miniflux’s “Star” feature, which newsboat supports, as reminders for articles I want to get back to instead of leaving them as unread.

Fallout S02E01: "The Innovator"

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:05:58 +0000

Series: Fallout
Season: 2
Episode: 1
Episode Title: The Innovator
Episode Overview: Every dollar spent is a vote cast.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 23:14:31 +0000

Title: The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Overview: Against the vibrant backdrop of a 1960s-inspired, retro-futuristic world, Marvel's First Family is forced to balance their roles as heroes with the strength of their family bond, while defending Earth from a ravenous space god called Galactus and his enigmatic Herald, Silver Surfer.

Incus alpine/3.23

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Alpine Linux 3.23.0 Incus images have been released.

chimo@chromic:~$ incus image list images:alpine/3.23 -c l --format compact
           ALIAS
 alpine/3.23 (3 more)
 alpine/3.23 (3 more)
 alpine/3.23/arm64 (1 more)
 alpine/3.23/arm64 (1 more)
 alpine/3.23/armhf (1 more)
 alpine/3.23/cloud (1 more)
 alpine/3.23/cloud (1 more)
 alpine/3.23/cloud/arm64
 alpine/3.23/cloud/arm64
 alpine/3.23/cloud/armhf

That was fast!

Alpine Linux 3.23.0

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Alpine Linux 3.23.0 has been released.

I’ve upgraded a bunch of Incus containers and my main machine and everything seems to be working so far.

The v3.23 Alpine Linux image for Incus isn’t yet available, but my trusty shuibar should notify me whenever that’s available so I can rebuild my custom base images.

pet

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 22:18:05 +0000

Bookmarked "pet" by knqyf263.

Simple command-line snippet manager

via Snippets manager by Thiago Perrotta

Liked: Snippets Manager

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 22:16:40 +0000

Liked "Snippets manager" by Thiago Perrotta.

Reusing my old phone as a universal remote

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.

I hooked up the IR receiver pins (left) to the raspberrypy’s pins (right) as follows:

Pin 1 -> Pin 18 (Out/GPIO)
Pin 2 -> Pin 6 (Ground/Ground)
Pin 3 -> Pin 1 (V_S/3V3 Power)

See: “GPIO and the 40-pin header”.

Software

Install lirc and dtoverlay:

# apk add lirc raspberrypi-utils-dtmerge

Load overlay:

# dtoverlay gpio-ir,gpio_pin=18

At this point, you should see a device named lirc0 in /dev/

Run mode2:

$ mode2 --driver default --device /dev/lirc0

Press a button on an infrared remote. You should see some output like:

pulse <number>
space <number>
…
timeout

For my purposes, I wanted to save the output to a file, so I piped the output to tee:

$ mode2 --driver default -d /dev/lirc0 | tee out.txt

Then pressed all the buttons on my remote one by one. Once done, hit Ctrl+C to exit.

Now, we want to only keep the numbers as space-separated list for each button. The following one-liner does the trick, but I’m sure there are better options out there:

sed -E 's/timeout [0-9]+//g' ./out.txt |     # Replace "timeout" lines with blank lines
    cut -d ' ' -f2 |                         # Only keep numbers
    sed -r ':a; N ;s/(.+)\n(.+)/\1 \2/; ta'  # Remove all newlines except on blank lines

Android

Install IR-Blaster.
Create a remote.
Create buttons using the decimal values captured.
Use your phone as a remote!

[1] My SGS5 runs LineageOS 18.1, the latest version available for this model. That version isn’t supported anymore. As such, I don’t connect this device to the internet. In fact, since it’s only used as a IR remote, both Wifi and Bluetooth are turned-off. ^

wsl-vpnkit

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,

wsl-vpnkit

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 02:10:08 +0000

Bookmarked "wsl-vpnkit" by sakai135.

Provides network connectivity to WSL 2 when blocked by VPN

Android IR Blaster

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 02:03:03 +0000

Bookmarked "android-ir-blaster" by iodn.

Create custom infrared (IR) remotes using hex codes, raw signals, or Flipper Zero .IR files

mode2 partial read

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

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.

The command is available in the “raspberrypi-utils-dtmerge” package.