TL;DR Just let me download it I have been trying to come up with a good, reliable way to build executables for Windows from Linux for a long time. One of the longer running problems I have had is that the ground keeps shifting out from under me. Sometimes, you’ve got exactly the set of requirements that you need, and that’s all you want! But, when I have previously used things like the MinGW toolchain from Fedora - I would have had to freeze the exact machine I was building on in order to be able to reproduce the same results as before.

I just got a new Pixel device from the Pixel 9 family. While I enjoy the device so far, I don’t want to talk so much about the device here. One of the first things I did with the device was install GrapheneOS onto it for enhanced privacy and security from the spying eyes of the public corporate overlords who want to harvest data for their advertisers. It’s obviously a great business model for them, but I don’t really want to be part of it any more than I am required to be.

I know picking a shell in Unix is, by no means, a simple thing. People have very strong opinions about the shells that they want to use. Beyond using their favorite terminal program, the shell a developer, engineer, or administrator uses is something that is a highly personal choice. Most of us who have been working with a particular shell for a while have probably developed deeply ingrained habits and personalization choices.

I’ve managed to recently upgrade my image building process for this website, using some of what I have been learning about Nix. For a while while I was first learning to use Nix I thoguht of the language, the packages, and the OS as being one thing. And this did a disservice to both the breadth of what Nix offers as well as the capabilities it offers. Old Paradigm So previously with this site I used a fairly straightforward and manual process.

If you are interested in running multiple versions of the same development language using Nix and Nix Flakes, ride along while I setup a development environment that includes Python 2.7, 3.5-3.12 along with necessary development libraries. I will not be covering installing Nix on your system or the basics of the Nix package system or language. At the link above, you can see and fetch the flake.nix file. Each commit in the repository corresponds to a version of the file in this post.

What is CI? DRY CI So I have talked before about what CI actually means. That post was, admittedly, rather dry and academic. I think it’s important to sometimes make the distinction between what is just regular automation and what is strictly CI. When there is automation but no CI it is still very easy for errors to slip into a supposedly stable code base, as not every commit is tested before it is merged to the main.

So I’ve been playing around with NixOS on a Raspberry Pi 4 that I have at the house. NixOS seems like a great idea, but getting it onto the Raspberry Pi 4 is something of a beast of a process. So I wanted to document here how I did it. Most of the process is the normal NixOS installation process, with a few tweaks at the very end. My Pi’s Case is a Challenge Rather than having a plain Raspberry Pi 4 and writing the SD image provided by the NixOS team to that image, I have my Pi in an [Argon One m.

What is CI? DRY CI At work I have been doing CI for nearly 10 years, now. Having been working at Red Hat for the past 6 of those, some of the CI work that I do is available in open source contributions up on Git Hub. I plan to make a series of posts about that work, so I am going to start with this brief discussion of the very idea of CI before I get into working on the particular types of CI that I do.

So I recently grabbed a PinePhone, because my old Galaxy S9+ has been dying a slow death. The old one started out being finnicky about docking to the car, then charging became an intermittent hassle, then the screen started to die slowly. So it was time to get a replacement. Might as well go with something very different and out of place, eh? Why not take a look at the only generally available smartphone that was running an upstream version of Linux?

America has a respect problem. Well, specifically Texas has a respect problem. People respect others too much. You see, there is too much respect going around right now, and I won’t contribute to it. This week Governor Abbott announced that he’s going to be rescinding the mask mandate he has had in place since last summer. Texas ranks last in distribution of the current COVID-19 vaccines. Yes, the vaccine infections have been falling lately, but they’ve fallen before only to rise again when we’ve reduced our vigilence.