mrkc.me

I'm not gonna get into the LLM/"AI" debate right now. I'm not a fan of it but also not a purist and for a variety of reasons I've had to learn a little about it. Fortunately, I have yet to actually need to use cloud-based models and have been able to use local ones just fine. Running models locally doesn't get around all the ethical implications but it goes a long way, in my estimation. To that end, I've found Ollama to be the easiest way to get up and running. I like the idea of not having this natively installed, especially since the only option is to manually install the binary (or curl | sh it :/). Fortunately, Ollama publishes a container image.…

My name is Yon Yonson
I come from Wisconsin
I work in a lumber yard there
As I walk down the street
All the people I meet
They say "Hello!"
I say "Hello!"
They say "What's your name?"
I say

Naming things is hard and the temptation to come up with the Right Naming Convention™ can become a mental block for a certain type of person 👀

A few years ago I saw an great thread by katef on X the everything app discussing the various things they do with terminal rendering and they mentioned using the colors from Bang Wong's Points of view: Color blindness published in Nature. I try to use them at least as a starting point in most of the graphs that I make now. I think they actually look nice too.

…

I've been thinking a lot lately about the value that tracking personal data has the potential to add, and about the costs that often comes with it. For example, devices like Fitbits or Garmins can provide useful insight into your fitness routine.…

I recently updated my Bash prompt. It started because I wanted to incorporate git status information into the prompt. But once I got that working it turned out I didn't really like it so I ditched it but kept the other stuff I did.

A quick script to dynamically update Cloudflare DNS.

There comes a time in every sysadmin's life where they need to run SSH on an alternate port. Should be as simple as adding multiple Port <number> directives to /etc/sshd/config and issuing a restart to the daemon.…

I was doing some backups and realized my photos, which I keep in Dropbox (sue me) were taking up about 50G. I knew there had to be a lot of duplicates but searching for them through 50G of files would be tedious. This seemed like a task that should be easily solvable with a simple one-line but my shell-foo was simply not up to the task.…

I recently ran into some trouble with the system while mucking around and decided to take the opportunity to restructure my partitioning layout and do a full OS reinstall; this time with full disk encryption (except /boot). Suffice it to say, the Fedora installer is fairly flexible, but not nearly enough to support a mix of mdadm, LUKS, and LVM.…

Here's the weather function I use when I'm too lazy to look out the window. The only configuration is a free forecast.io API key. The main selling point is that it geolocates so you don't have to remember where you are. Though this has drawbacks if you're running it on remote servers far from your location. If that's a problem then go get one of those silly weather() functions that doesn't know where it is unless you tell it.

Let's say you're a Linux admin in a Windows shop (ha) and you'd like to be able to access your company shares via a real operating system. Even more, you'd like these shares to be accessible immediately after boot.…

I recently implemented LVM caching based largely on Richard WM Jones' post and thought I'd document my own experience here.

A quick example of how to enable trim support for block devices.

I fired up my first CentOS 7 instance and there are a lot of new things that I’ve been avoiding learning. Namely, FirewallD.