Gab Notes

“KOReader is a document viewer for E Ink devices”, as they advertise it. I use it as an alternative UI on my Kobo e-reader as I find it nicer than the default UI. It’s easy to install and is compatible with Wallabag, my read-it-later service of choice. Recently, I moved my self-hosted Wallabag instance to be only accessible from Tailscale, as I’m the only user. It was all good since all my devices are connected to the Tailnet. All but my e-reader.

Home Assistant I’ve been using Home Assistant for about 7 years now, and it’s kept improving ever since. This continuous improvement is in part due to the company backing it with full time people working to make it the best home automation software. It’s also thanks to the large number of contributors who spent time creating integrations with a variety of devices and services. In HA, every interaction with the outside world goes through an integration.

I’ve been learning Rust for a few weeks now. It’s really interesting! I’m coming from Go so I’m used to a statically typed, compiled language and workflow. This post is my opinion as a Rust beginner and Go seasoned developer. It’s probably full of blind spots, biases and errors.

In June last year, I installed Fedora on my freshly delivered Framework laptop. I liked Fedora because it provided a nice, decently up-to-date experience of the Linux desktop. I initially installed GNOME, but quickly switched to KDE, which I found easier to use with my split keyboard (a story for another time). At that point, I had solved a couple of issues on my laptop but I didn’t remember which ones or how I solved them.

In June last year, I installed Fedora on my freshly delivered Framework laptop. I liked Fedora because it provided a nice, decently up-to-date experience of the Linux desktop. I initially installed GNOME, but quickly switched to KDE, which I found easier to use with my split keyboard (a story for another time). At that point, I had solved a couple of issues on my laptop but I didn’t remember which ones or how I solved them.

This writing prompt was suggested by Pika, from Kevin McDonald’s library. My immediate answer was “electricity”, because it powers so much of today’s infrastructures. Now, for a more thought out approach, we first need to define what technology is. Then, we need to define what being able to live without something means. So what’s technology?

My docker containers suddenly were unable to resolve DNS names, which blocked them from accessing the remote database they need. The symptoms were various but in the end the containers failed to start. Go apps had a log similar to this: dial tcp: lookup db.example.com on 127.0.0.11:53: server misbehaving Python apps were outputing large stack traces, and so on. The fix was to completely remove the container (docker compose down) and re-create it. Stopping and restarting it was not enough.

My docker containers suddenly were unable to resolve DNS names, which blocked them from accessing the remote database they need. The symptoms were various but in the end the pods failed to start. Go apps had a log similar to this: dial tcp: lookup db.example.com on 127.0.0.11:53: server misbehaving Python apps were outputing large stack traces, and so on. The fix was to completely remove the container (docker compose down) and re-create it. Stopping and restarting it was not enough.

When handling pictures from iOS devices on other operating systems, we often see the infamous .heic extension. Some web services like ones who offer to produce a photo book or calendar and which are overly popular around the winter festivities only accept JPEG files.

🏃🏻 On a rush? Don’t want to read the whole piece? Don’t bother asking an AI to summarize! Read the TL;DR: I tried moving from an iPhone 15 Pro to a Pixel 9 Pro with GrapheneOS. Most things worked fine. Others like family photo sharing and calendar sharing were clunky and/or required server-side components that I didn’t want to maintain. Still others like mobile payment or AirTag-like devices just didn’t work. So I moved back, glad I did the experience.