Matthew Ames

I've installed Ubuntu again. I had been distro hopping for a little while, but when all is said and done, Ubuntu simply has that homely quality that none of the other distros have, in my opinion. I fired up Ubuntu and I felt like I was where I belonged. The only caveat is that the Steam snap sucks.

Here's my current Fedora setup, in full. That's Ghostty, Starship and Helix all configured with very little actual changes from the base

Thanks to @latenightlinux.bsky.social, especially the Linux Dev Time, I have discovered www.chezmoi.io, an incredibly easy way to keep your dotfiles in sync between machines, using git as a backend, and written in Go.

My current Ghostty config. It's really that simple to configure, and there's not much more that you really need

My current Ghostty config. It's really that simple to configure, and there's not much more that you really need

I feel like I've been very Ubuntu-pilled recently. I've been getting frustrated that even the most recent Ubuntu versions don't really have up to date apps. For instance, 24.04 only comes with Podman 4.9, despite 5.0 being available at the time of release.

Ghostty is definitely the best terminal application you'll use on MacOS or Linux. Their killer feature is simply using OS defaults for everything where possible and is fully platform native. No need to mess with config to get the basics done. My config file literally only contains the theme and font

I have finally come to realise where my issues have been with Ansible. I was trying to create a single mono-playbook which would run tasks across multiple servers (only two in my case), but it would cause a number of issues

By having entirely separate playbooks for the different realms of repeatability, I have massively improved my ability to read and understand my code. My containers runbook has a role for installing a single container, but that role is repeated multiple times to install everything I need to run

I have finally come to realise where my issues have been with Ansible. I was trying to create a single mono-playbook which would run tasks across multiple servers (only two in my case), but it would cause a number of issues

Firstly a mono-playbook is difficult to understand and edit, obviously, but it also meant the output was also difficult to read. If the summary at the end said anything had changed, I would need to read everything to understand what exactly. Not easy with 100s of tasks.

Having good fun today with Dockge. Ansible drops compose.yaml files into a Dockge directory, runs docker compose up, and walks away. From that point I can update, restart and check logs of containers without issue.

This removes a lot of the mental load of setting up my containers, trying to remember the process.

Having good fun today with Dockge. Ansible drops compose.yaml files into a Dockge directory, runs docker compose up, and walks away. From that point I can update, restart and check logs of containers without issue.

Today my noodling with Semaphore UI continues. I can combine a webhook with an ansible playbook to automatically create things for me. E.g, I could create the btrfs subvolume, the mount it in the right place, configure DNS and forwarding proxy to the container... But how do I kick that off?

The issue, of course, is that storage needs to exist before the container. So I need a process in which I can trigger the webhook with the variable I require and only *then* define my container.

I feel like I need a tool for managing the storage on my Raspberry Pi. I'm using Portainer for managing my containers, which is backed by a BTRFS volume. It would be rather snazzy to have a similar web interface for configuring my subvolumes, mountpoints and, most usefully, snapshotting and backups

I find it quite interesting that many #opensource projects haven't at least set up their accounts here. There's no Firefox, Ubuntu, Fedora presence here. VSCode, which absolutely smashes it with YouTube Shorts (and TikToks I guess?) also is interesting in its absence.

It's hackathon week this week at work, and I've gotta say that everything is going swimmingly. I was struggling to find a project, so I picked something someone asked me to do offhandedly a few months back, and I've realised it unblocks something completely unrelated.