I like FreeBSD’s container implementation with jails. It’s one of these clean, solid solutions that simply work for years now and for many more to come. That said, there’s always space for improvement and this case is not any different. I started with iocage as it simplified a lot of headaches with base jails and VNET setup I had in the past. There are other solutions out there though that I keep an eye on – bastille and pot in particular. The latter seems to be relatively new kid on the block, but it already provides unique feature with support for nomad. The former is pushing in the direction I really like.

From the new features I’m mostly excited of is definitely support of the CURRENT jails. Granted, the host must be on the same or newer version but it’s still there – I had to do a lot of juggling with iocage to make it fly, whereas here, it just works. I think it’s safe to say that with the current templates implementation and template arguments (within Bastillefile) are making Bastille the closest thing to Docker in the FreeBSD world.

Recently, after I switched to FreeBSD on my server, I decided to pay more attention to the temperatures. As I’m using Prometheus with node_exporter the CPU temperatures are exported as node_cpu_temperature_celsius automatically. They didn’t, however, show any values (only NULL). It turned out that the special device driver has to be loaded first: coretemp. In order to enable it, it has be added to /boot/loader.conf:

echo 'coretemp_load="YES"' >> /boot/loader.conf

dnscontrol has got to be one of my most beloved “DevOps” tools out there. Possibility of describing DNS in a config file (even though, for whatever reason, javascript was chosen for syntax) gives me huge peace of mind. It can integrate with plethora of different providers through their APIs and almost every major release brings even more of them. Ever since I learned about its existence I use it all the time, everywhere I go. Just smash it into git, ensure some review takes place and roll it out, everything fully automated through CI piepelines. If that doesn’t sound beautiful I don’t know what does 🤷🏻‍♂️

I must admit that I never was a great fan of Photoshop. Sure, there was a time when I knew my ways around it, but back then I was already user of the alternative – GIMP. I still have a softspot for it in my heart and I applaud efforts of having fully fledged open source image manipulation app, but on macOS there are so many great alternatives that it really makes sense to go native. One of my all time favorites, and with the relase of version 2.0 even more so, is Pixelmator Pro. With the introduction of the ML-based features built-in these days, it’s hard to find anything that even compares.

I’ve been looking for a native Mac video client for a long time. For the most part, let’s be honest, VLC fits the bill. But this one is cross-platform and not really a native solution. That’s where IINA comes to play (literally). It’s a gorgeous, modern Mac app that integrates and supports all the things you’d expect from this kind of application. It comes, among others, with the built-in support for Safari, Touch Bar, Dark Mode, Picture-in-Picture etc. If you were missing a well made Mac app to play your videos, or other sorts of multimedia for that matter, look no further.