Extracting archives is a pain on Linux. There are just so many types and so many programs to extract each type. A .tar.gz file is extracted using the program GNU tar1, but for a .zip file, you’d need unzip2. What’s that? You’ve got a .7z file? Yeah-no, can’t use either of the before mentioned extractors, you need 7-zip3. Got a .rar, you’d need… well, you get the point. What’s more, some of these programs require flags you’ll need to use to actually extract an archive. For example, to extract a tar file, you might do something like tar xvf <filename>. For a 7z file though, it’d be 7z x <filename>. Other extraction programs don’t require flags at all though, just the name of the extraction program followed by the file to extract. This sounds simple enough, but wait… what was the name of the program to unzip .bz2 files again? ...

In many languages there’s a need to add decorations, or glyphs to characters, like for example é or č. These are called diacritics1. These characters don’t exist on a US Standard qwerty keyboard. There is the US International version with dead keys, which allow for crafting these special characters by pressing the desired diacritic key followed by the character to apply it to. So for example pressing ~ followed by n results in an ñ. ...

I have a homelab, or more simply a personal server I run at home. It’s a small square black box that sits in my office, humming away. This server runs Proxmox VE1, a hypervisor. This controls pretty much everything that goes on, on this server. It has the ability to spin up containers, which it calls LXC’s. These are somewhat akin to Docker containers. Anyway, the process of spinning one of these up is super simple. Click a few buttons, allocate some space and there’s your ‘container’. ...

And once again a new Hello World post is born. This is the umpteenth iteration of this website, as I cannot seem to stop wanting to change things up. I like trying out new ideas. Sometimes they lead somewhere, mostly they don’t. The last version of this site placed the content into a more documentation-like website format. I thought I’d like that more than a blog—mainly for organizational purposes. A bit more structured than the throw it at a wall and see what sticks blog approach. ...