Log in Subscribe
This Week on Bluenet

This week on Bluenet #1

"My laptop runs an operating system called NixOS. So do nearly all of my servers [...] What if you could ls into a sort-by and echo your mom?? Also written in Rust."

blue linden
· 3 min read
About ten nested Zellij instances in a terminal

Hi! It's been a while since I posted. I've been fine, I had just been waiting for something big to blog about. But as I kept posting on Instagram and Mastodon about my struggles with my computers, it finally hit me: I could just blog about this stuff! So here's a maybe-recurring series where I talk about the cool and novel tech in my life: This Week on Bluenet.

This is for Linux-nerdy people. While I'll always try to make things make sense, I may not have time to fully clarify some things. Just because you may not be able to follow everything happening in this post doesn't mean that you aren't smart. It just means that the Linux mob hasn't caught up to you yet.

My setup, for the unfamiliar

My laptop runs an operating system called NixOS. So do nearly all of my servers. It's an immutable (meaning key system files can't be modified) and (semi-) reproducible (meaning if my computer gets hit by a bus and I get out alive, the configuration files are enough to create the same setup on a new computer without much manual intervention) operating system. It centralizes a lot of the harder aspects of configuring systems.

My room's lighting is managed by software called Home Assistant. I have eight lights managed by the software in my room, plus a fan, a vacuum and a speaker.

Everything in the setup is networked together using Tailscale. I can access servers while away and even run remote deployments. I call my Tailnet (the official name for the networks created using Tailscale) Bluenet.

Additions (in the last month)

Everything below runs NixOS.

ninja: A Raspberry Pi 4 with a big hard drive

This will be either a storage or a media server for me once I get it set up. It's not attached to a display.

beekeeper: A Toshiba NB 305 netbook from 2010

Right now, I don't have big plans for this. It currently runs a terminal inside of a kiosk-style Wayland compositor named Cage. The terminal is Havoc, running genact, which spouts meaningless hacker-like messages out on the screen. It looks cool and leaves room to do other tasks on the netbook. It only has 1 gigabyte of RAM and a single CPU core, so it's quite limited. I tried making it a Home Assistant dashboard, but it wouldn't even load the web interface unless I made it use the horrible GPU

Successful changes

boo: My main laptop

  • Default text editor changed from Micro to Helix, a really cool text editor inspired by Kakoune and in the same spirit as Vim. It's made in Rust! JOIN THE RUST CULT.
  • Shell changed from zsh to nushell with starship as the prompt: what if your shell was data??? Bro?? What if you could ls into a sort-by and echo your mom?? Also written in Rust.

In progress

boo

  • Start using Helix as an IDE replacement for vscodium because of the better speed/productivity
  • Switch from GNOME + PaperWM to Niri because of how damn lightweight and customizable it seems. Also it's written in Rust. Have I mentioned that yet?

fireknight: My Home Assistant server

  • Create a proper, smart dashboard that I can use to control my room instead of forcing my amazing Inovelli light switch to do more things.

Bye-bye!

Thank you for reading this! I'm trying to post more now that I've got free time again. No clue whether it'll work. If you've got questions or comments, feel free to email me at [email protected].

Happy pride month, from your favorite online they/she'er!

Next week I'll be doing a deep dive on productivity-hacking with cool window managers! Subscribe and stay tuned!

Microblog