2024's Devlog

2X.04

Reading:

• Eelco Dolstra - The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model

1X.04

Reading:

• Liu Cixin - The Dark Forest

Watching:

• The World's End (2013)
• Poor Things (2023)

Listening:

• Peter Gabriel - Scratch My Back

0X.04

Converted my home NixOs infrastructure to Nix Flakes. Pinning the entire OS configuration to a specific revision(s) of Nixpkgs and having it build/rollback without any fears is a breath of fresh air :)

Listening:

• Sam Harris & Robert Sapolsky - We Really Don't Have Free Will?

2X.03

Watching:

• Dune: Part Two
• The Holy Mountain (1973)

Reading:

• NixOS in Production
• Cixin Liu - Theee Body Problem

Listening:

• Lor

1X.03

Finally having some time to play around with the used Octatrack unit I bought a couple months ago. It still surprises me how much hardware-centered music making machines feel similar to terminal-based tools such as bash/zsh/nu and vim.

Still fiddling with NixOs, making tiny steps towards using it as a daily driver.

0X.03

Watching:

• Crumb (1994)

Listening:

• Ryuichi Sakamoto - Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
• Jacob Collier - Djesse Vol. 4

A pleasant surprise: Djesse Vol. 4 - Box Full Of Stars Pt. 2 contains a few words in Polish at 2.15

2X.02

Picked up an Arduino and started playing around with Rust for AVRs.

Watching:

• Hayao Miyazaki - The Boy and the Heron
• David Lynch - Dune

Listening:

• Son Lux - Prophecy
• Daft Punk - Infinity Repeating

1X.02

TODO: add note on making myself look like an idiot when attempting to contribute to nixpkgs.

Listening:

• Daft Punk - Human After All
• Alan Parsons Project - Ammonia Avenue

0X.02

Listening:

• Robert Sapolsky - Human Behavioral Biology

Reading:

• Peter Watts - Behemoth

2X.01

Done some optimisations of my infrastructure:

• All services are now accessible from IPv6
• Switched from TCP to UNIX sockets in the Postgres database used by Invidious instance
• Fine-tuned Postgres with PGTune, hoping to see some results in my monitoring. Doing that configuration via NixOs was a breeze

To my surprise, after 2 days I took a look at my monitoring charts and saw visible improvements in my metrics:

• CPU usage is down a lot
• Almost 3 times less IO operations are performed
• CPU temperature is down by 10℃

..all of that while the request rate reported by Caddy hasn't changed!

Went back to my Invidious MR adding Prometheus metrics.

Listening:

• Depeche Mode - Exciter

Watching:

• Ennio (2021)

1X.01

Broke my whole IT infrastructure for 12+ hours due to a trivial mistake in static IP configuration. I haven't noticed it until late afternoon, the fix was rather easy but I learned a bit about nmcli. Funny adventure, worth it :)

Week 1 of going to the gym!

Bought a used Octatrack unit. I already have to hold myself back from tinkering with it instead of during house chores. Once I connect my piano to it I'm gonna be out for at least a few days :) The workflow is wonderful and the idea of having a single "macro knob" is both simple and effective.

Reading:

• Peter Watts - Maelstrom

Listening:

• Vulfpeck - Live at Madison Square Garden
• David Bowie - Sound and Vision (the pure piano version)

0X.01

Finished migrating my cloud & home instrastructure to NixOs. It really feels like an improvement over Ansible playbooks (although I am still using them for copying files & running system rebuilds, it is the easiest solution for me), as I can merge custom software builds/packaging with the system setup & configuration. Learned a bit about nftables in the process.

Trying out some funky rhytms - learning how to play Beastly by Vulfpeck. Amazed to see that they've made an official tutorial on that song and some others.

Reading:

• Peter Watts - Starfish

Listening:

• Nicolas Jaar - Space Is Only Noise If You Can See
• Jungle - For Ever
• Kenny G - Sade
• Lovage et al. - Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady by

Go back to 2023.