Linux

There is this nice utility which helps you with managing AWS credentials called aws-vault. It is quite nice to use it as it allows ad-hoc login as a specific profile via web browser, without the need for entering your credentials or performing 3 step process to log in, just: aws-vault login profile Where “profile” is specific AWS profile, and voila, you’re in. Besides that, it also keeps your credentials safe in one of the supported backends. Personally I use MacOS keychain which is default on MacOS for saving credentials, but on my personal rigs, which all run linux, I prefer to have credentials in Password Store. That way I can sync credentials accross machines easily as well as manage and track them on the central place as I usually do with all my passwords. ...

ZFS is really nice filesystem and I use it wherever I can. I could write essays on the topic of ZFS and how awesome it is, and that is just what might happen some time in the future, but for now I’ll just show you how snapshots are managed on my machines. Why snapshots? There are 10 types of people: Those who do backups And those who will I’m not sure about you, but I’ve definitely deleted things I shouldn’t have only to realize few minutes (,or 3 days, or a month) later that I need the data that’s now gone. If I only had a point-in-time to which I could return and salvage my data… ...

Since recently I’m an Emacs user, and as such I like to have my Emacs everywhere. Including on the laptop which runs Fedora 30 at this moment. One of the most crucial things for me is email, which is being handled by mu/mu4e. And since I was unable to google things properly I was going through hassle of downloading and building mu from the source code, which then provided me with mu4e.el as well. ...

Although recently I’ve switched most of my workflow into the Emacs ? I still edit things here and there in Vim. Vim doesn’t have many nice and fancy features enabled by default, but that’s OK, I like it light. But not so light… soo… this post will show configuration options I have stacked throughout the years by using Vim and explanation of some. Recently to have NerdTree enabled I’ve added Pathogen which is loaded by ...

Those familiar with PostgreSQL know how it internally manages blocks for storing data and how when you delete some entry it is only marked dead (dead tuples). In order to reclaim space VACUUM needs to be run. Vacuuming database won’t give that space back to the operating system, instead, it will just reclaim it for further use. If you specify VACUUM FULL in that case PostgreSQL will return free space back to the operating system, but running such action requires locking the tables which depending on the database size and the time it takes might not be optimal solution to run anytime. ...

Recently I started experimenting with Flatpak. Mainly trying to use it for day-to-day apps like Slack or Skype. Flatpak applications are usually started by launching: flatpak run com.skype.Client You can see that this can quickly get pretty messy. Flatpak does provide the “.desktop” file for each of the application, and if you’re using desktop environment conforming to those standards, application will be listed in your application menu. If you’re on the other hand not using such environment, and like me, use some random WM or just prefer launching applications via command line we can make this a bit easier. ...

First off, what is kexec? - It is a system call that enables you to load and boot into another kernel from currently running kernel. That effectively means; doing reboot without going through the whole POST/Firmware load process. To use kexec we can rely on systemd to handle process for us. The only work we need to do is to install kexec-tools package and adjust some configs sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install kexec-tools Since Ubuntu usually relies on booting from grub we can tweak some settings to default to loading default grub kernel when we run kexec. That is usually set to latest kernel we have installed and is automatically adjusted after system upgrade. Contents of my /etc/default/kexec are as follows: ...

Ever since I’ve set up EFI boot on my machine using grub I had this issue with timeout option not wanting to go away. Digging into the issue I first looked at /boot/grub/grub.cfg where I found this piece of code: if [ $grub_platform = efi ]; then set timeout=30 if [ x$feature_timeout_style = xy ] ; then set timeout_style=menu fi fi “This is weird” I said to myself, where does that come from? It is defined in /etc/grub.d/00_header file ...

My main rig is running Ubuntu 18.04. To be more precise I opted out at install time to use Ubuntu Mate 18.04 but later on installed AwesomeWM and use that instead now. But without digressing much, I decided it was time to move my root (/) to ZFS. Why? - Because it is awesome! ZFS is my favorite FS of choice for some time now. I don’t use it everywhere (am trying to be smart about it) but I prefer to do whenever I have the chance. ...

URxvt, or if you wish to call it rxvt-unicode, has this weird thing turned on by default where it binds ctrl+shift keys to all sorts of insanity (keycap picture insert mode and stuff like that). Dammit, I want my “normal” terminal behavior back! By “normal” I think that if I press: Ctrl + Shift + V -> paste contents of my main clipboard (from X) Ctrl + Shift + C -> copy current selection to clipboard So to restore that functionality here’s the magic thing you need in your .Xresources file in order to achieve it: ...