howto

One of the coolest features of ZFS is that you can create snapshots of filesystems before making changes, and revert them later if those changes cause problems. This is great for major updates, especially involving experimental software. If you had your whole system on a single filesystem this would be very easy, but you probably don't, especially if you are using ZFS. Luckily, it is pretty simple to make and destroy these snapshots.

I have taken several attempts at writing a clear and concise guide to programming common radios with CHIRP. This is one of them. I am specifically writing to Baofeng UV-5R and friends, TIDRADIO TD-H8, and Yaesu FT-60 radios, and I am using Linux. These instructions will be somewhere close for most users, and I will include information for users of other platforms.

I thoroughly enjoyed the original game Subnautica, and have previously skipped the semi-sequel Subnautica: Below Zero (commonly and hence "BZ" when I feel like it) because of predominantly bad reviews from people who were disappointed that it wasn't more like the original. I'm happy to report that while their complaints are not unfounded, they don't make it not worth playing - and also that you can have a satisfying experience on Linux.

I have Docker installed, I want to try running a Rust server, I'm installing it in Docker to keep it contained for cleanliness' sake.

I recently decided that I was feeling too limited by the very high-quality but super-simple ArcGIS Online. I understand they're not in the business of giving me the best for free, but I'm also not going to pay for ArcGIS, and I need features that I'm not getting in their online version - like being able to force map label visibility. I'm not even sure I'm going to get that with mapserver, but I have been meaning to get back into it for a while anyway.

For some reason, the thumb trackball mice always seem to wake up my computer in the night. This would be understandable if there were pets involved, but there aren't. I disabled wake from the mouse in BIOS, but it doesn't seem to have done anything. My top search result for linux stop computer waking from sleep on mouse activity turned out to be an askubuntu page on this subject which contained a high quality answer. Here is a distillation:

I have been using PlayOnLinux to manage wineprefixes on my Devuan system and decided to branch out and try using Lutris today. I have been having trouble with it since I installed CUDA (plus the accompanying nvidia drivers) from deb files instead of just using the run file.

One of my on and off again Drupal projects is a food information database, built mostly around whatever the current government official database is. These days that is the USDA FNDDS, or Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies.

I use Devuan with sysvinit because I do not normally have boot time problems, but I found myself with some and this is how I fixed them.

I use a 1GB tmpfs on my Linux system, which causes problems with some installs which write their temporary files to /tmp. Here's a way to somewhat gracefully set TMPDIR for every user logging in: