LGUG2Z - Overview

I have a confession to make. Until yesterday, I did not have any form of dotfiles management or versioning for my Windows 11 machine. Yes, I, the person who wrote an entire tiling window manager for Windows from scratch in Rust, did not manage my dots. I had to sheepishly admit this on more than one occasion in the project Discord server when people would watch my live programming videos and then ask if I could share my Windows dotfiles repo. I became a full time NixOS user earlier this year. I tried running it as my main OS for a few months, but the Linux desktop experience still leaves a lot to be desired, and one of the downsides of writing a tiling window manager that does everything that you want it to do exactly the way you want it to do it, is that going back to other tiling wms that you thought were great before becomes harder. So I settled on running Windows 11 with komorebi as my

I came across an interesting thread on the NixOS subreddit today that helped me fix a problem that I didn't even know I had with my NixOS system configuration. Every now and then, I'll try to quickly do nix-shell -p somepackage, and it will fail, because somepackage couldn't be found. I go and check https://search.nixos.org and it's there. Huh. Weird. So I just go and add it to my environment.systemPackages to install it, and remove it if it turns out I don't really need it. This alternative step works because my system configuration flake is pointing to a different version of nixpkgs than the nix-shell command. So what's the solution? Let's make nix-shell use the same version of nixpkgs as the system configuration flake! {inputs, ...}: { nix = { registry = { nixpkgs = { flake = inputs.nixpkgs; }; }; nixPath = [ "nixpkgs=${inputs.nixpkgs.outPath}" "nixos-config=/etc/nixos/configuration.nix" "/nix/var/nix/prof…

Last October, Plex started blocking access to instances running on servers hosted by Hetzner. I have a Hetzner Auction server that I renew every year or so to make use of newer hardware, which I use to run various workloads, from web services, to scheduled jobs and self-hosted instances of privacy-friendly alternative web frontends like Nitter. Another one of those workloads, until recently, was Plex. I didn't have the time to put too much effort into getting around the Hetzner network ban when it was first implemented, so I just started running Jellyfin instead. I even made a video demonstrating how easy it was to get Jellyfin up and running on a VPS. The Initial View from Europe Since getting laid off I finally had some time to try and think about how to get Plex working again. My circumstances have changed since I first started hosting Plex back in the early 2010s: I no longer travel for work (previously, I was an ICRC field delegate and later, for a time, a software development co…

Before this week, it had been a long time since I visited the Plex subreddit. I shared my last article there, which was a technical write-up of moving my Plex instance from a Hetzner auction server to a virtual machine running on hardware in my home network, and the considerations that influenced the migration. It didn't take long for me to realize that a culture of hostility towards even the mention of Hetzner or other cloud hosting providers has strongly taken root since Plex announced it's blanket network ban on IP ranges associated with Hetzner data centers. I saw many posts and comments of users asking about issues with their Plex instances that had for years been working without issue on Hetzner servers until this past October when Plex enacted their very poorly communicated network ban, which hit a significant number of customers like myself who had paid for a lifetime Plex Pass. Although I myself am not pursuing this option for reasons outlined in my last article, I wanted to s…

For the most part I feel very much at home on the Hachyderm Mastodon server; it's probably the best social media experience that I can remember having and I have had the pleasure of interacting with so many cool and impassioned people there. Hachyderm implements the default 500 character post limit which is hard-coded into the Mastodon codebase and as of writing these, seems unlikely to ever be made configurable. Every now and then, especially when adding summaries to long (1hr+) live programming videos that I share across the Fediverse, I come up against that limit. At the end of last year, I had an idea: Why don't I just self-host my own Mastodon instance that allows for posts that are longer than 500 chars, make longer posts on that account, and then boost them from my main account on Hachyderm? Sounds easy, right? Well... Using my domain I wanted to be able to use my current domain so that I could be looked up as @jeezy@lgug2z.com. This is actually quite well documented and can be …

I have tried running the Attic Nix Binary Cache on my Hetzner dedicated server in Germany a few times in the past, but the peering issues and the latency to Xfinity in Seattle have always made me throw my hands up in frustration. This morning I noticed a comment by Zhaofeng on the repo issue tracker. As a NixOS aficionado myself, I begrudgingly admit that I've been running my instance on fly.io 😛 I'm not sure if this is comment is still current, but hey, if Zhaofeng is/was running his binary cache on fly.io, there's no reason why we can't too, right? Storage While Attic does support local storage, I figured I'd use Cloudflare's R2 as a storage backend, both as an excuse to try out the free tier (10GB), and because it'll be easy enough to lift-and-shift if I ever decide to move the server from fly.io. It's easy enough to create a new R2 bucket and grab a read-write API token scoped to the bucket on the Cloudflare Dashboard. Server Configuration Once we have our credentials, we can put…