Tutorial

When moving around in my terminal, I use two commands in sequence all the time. You’ll know them, they are cd and ls. Change directory, then list the contents of that directory. I decided this was getting annoying. Why is there not a single command to do this? Why not make one? I first thought an alias might work, but then I realised you cannot call an alias, hand it a variable and have it do something after that variable. <alias> <user variable> <second action> is just not possible. ...

It’s great that your OS tries to protect you from yourself, because let’s face it, you don’t always make the best decisions. When you download an app macOS slaps a com.apple.quarantine extended attribute on it. This is what triggers Gatekeeper’s super duper handy popup asking you if you are really, truly sure you want to open a thing you just deliberately downloaded. If you could just click OK on this and move on, that’d be fine. It’s a little reminder that “hey, you did a thing you might not want to do”. And it does this sometimes. Other times it will flat out deny you running it. You’d have to go into settings and click through menus to allow the application in order to actually launch it. This is going too far. Luckily a single terminal command will handle it in one fell swoop. ...

I have been switching browsers a lot these last few months. The new CEO of Mozilla, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, stated in his post that “It [Firefox] will evolve into a modern AI browser”1. This rubbed me the wrong way. Granted, Mozilla has been adding junk to their browser for a while now and none of it is good. He floated the idea of blocking ad-blockers in an interview. The Verge wrote: “He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission”2. ...

On an Apple Macbook, there’s a file browser. It’s always “open” and always in the program switcher, which bugs the heck out of me. It’s called Finder and I need it to go away when I am not using it. By default it’s impossible to actually quit Finder due to it being such a large part of the OS. It even handles the desktop, for example. I personally don’t use macOS in the intended way. I don’t have a launcher bar, all my applications are launched through shortcuts. I do not use, or really ever see the desktop. I do use the application switcher. A lot. Having that stupid face icon there is one thing. Having to tab over it to get from one app to the next is too much. ...

LUKS, Linux Unified Key Setup, is a way to encrypt partitions on Linux. It’s a good way to store sensitive data on a flash drive or on your main system. Usage is super simple. You issue a command to unlock it and it will prompt you for your passphrase. After entering the right one, you can mount the partition and use it as normal. When you’re done with it, you umount the partition and lock it with another command. Without the right passphrase the data on the partition is just noise. ...

Rsync is an amazing utility to copy (or sync) stuff from one place to another without having to worry about the command getting cut. With a plain cp, an interrupted transfer means starting over from scratch. Rsync compares source and destination, skipping files that are already there, and with --partial it can even resume a file that was only halfway through. It can also remember ownership and permissions, and even copy over ssh. That is, with the right flags, which I can never remember. Hence this post. ...

I’m used to formatting disks on Linux with GParted, but unfortunately there’s no version for MacOS. They offer some sort of bootable image, but that sounded like a hassle. Luckily it turns out MacOS has a built-in tool. Usage is simple. I wanted to format a drive to ExFat, and all it takes is: 1 diskutil list To list the drives on your system and find the name of the one you want to format. Then: ...

Typing takes time. Typing without typos is an art. Fixing mistakes in a terminal command is a pain in the neck. Luckily there’s such a thing as aliases. An alias lets you set a keyword and a command it should expand to. For example, I have set a super simple one, which is widely used: alias ..='cd ..'. This allows me to write .. in terminal and it will act like cd .., saving me typing a c, a d and a space. This seems minor, but when you imagine how often I need to go up a directory in terminal, it’s a huge timesaver. ...

I have a ZFS dataset named data, mounted at /data, which I bind-mount into my LXC containers. The dataset is a three drive set with a lot of storage space. Basically, this huge pool of gigabytes is shared by all LXC containers that need to store serious amounts of data. Think Immich, for photo storage, or Jellyfin and all the movies, series and music it has to be able to play. As you may imagine, having several different LXCs write to the same “drive” may cause permission issues. ...

It’s about that time. There’s a new1 version of Proxmox VE in town and it has had a couple of months to “stabilize”. Now is the time to bump up the version of that homelab. I’ve pulled the trigger and did the upgrade. The following is my experience with doing this update. I’ve run into some issues, which all got solved and I didn’t break my server. Prerequisites You must be on PVE 8.4.1 or newer before upgrading. Check with: ...