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desk-1

There I was, wanting to write these every six months... Maybe I will better outline them now that I discovered the absolutely fabulous[1] app named Folding Text. It's been already over a year after last status post and boy, oh boy, a lot has happened during that time. I've got the impression that last eight months everything accelerated so much that it's hard to keep up.

Viktor

  • On 10th of February this year my 👶🏼 son was born.
    • Early morning we landed in the Vivantes Humboldt clinic here in Berlin and it was quickly assessed that the C-section will be required.
    • Compared to the labor with our first kiddo here it was like an instant baby, ready to roll in no time.
    • Hearing his scream for the first time was very emotional moment. Hearing it for the next three months a bit less.
  • We raised our daughter and were quite confident in our abilities as parents. Yet, Viktor surprised us in many different ways, starting with being completely, totally different baby than our older one.
    • He doesn't accept pacifier and allowed for some walks in the stroller for the first few weeks -- after that screaming and shouting starts after 15-20 minutes.
    • But on the bright side he is very strong and capable (not to say stubborn...) and it seems he may start walking much faster than Auri.
  • All in all, without our friends & family kicking in and helping out it would prove very difficult for both of us to pull this one off. We'll remain forever grateful for their support ❤️

COVID-19 & Lockdown

  • Beginning of March everything has become more and more... Tense. Sure, there were already indications of seriousness in February, especially when some products became unavailable in our local shops and things alike, but it wasn't until March when stuff got serious -- including closure of Kindergarten for my daughter 👧🏼 followed later on by closure of all playgrounds and advices to minimize all social interactions whatsoever.
  • February-March proved to be very difficult with a newborn and pandemic outbreak. They are a bit blurry already, probably for the best.
  • In April I got back to work -- remotely, of course. My local setup was continuously evolving and improving and now I actually prefer it over my desk in the office
  • These days in Germany it's much better COVID-wise -- at least right now, while we enter Autumn and flu season. I'm in the office twice a week and I still find it surprising to see people in the masks everywhere 😷

FreeBSD migration

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  • In case anyone is interested, the NUC model in the picture above is a NUC7i3BNK with 16G of RAM[2] and 1T Samsung 970 Evo NVMe M.2 SSD.
  • I always had a soft spot for FreeBSD... At some point I started toying with the idea of replacing my dedicated Hetzner Ubuntu box I've been using for quite some time.
    • I started with reevaluating my needs. This way I got rid of, as an example, GitLab and all of the related CI stuff. It's fun, but not for tiny little projects I have on side.[3]
    • Deciding on the software stack was also quite important and improved the flow of the rollout and the move considerably.
  • The only thing I would do better and I'm working on fixing now is the lack of proper automation. I went with shell scripting and git hooks for the rollout and it was a mistake. Very quickly I hit some edge cases and what not and I'm now moving to Ansible.
  • I'll surely write about it more as I did in the past, but man I can't recommend enough yadm for handling dot files. It's so easy and straight-forward, without any additional scripting necessary around it for the rollout etc. It just works and behaves like a git repo, perfect match.
  • I'll definitely get back to this topic at some point to reevaluate how's it going and what I like and dislike in this setup.

Jekyll migration

  • Migration to self-hosted FreeBSD on a NUC was also joined with migrating back to Jekyll after quite some time with WordPress.
    • It's not that I was unhappy with WP, it worked OK, but I had a real anxiety when it comes to security of that thing. And sure enough, I could jail it easily on BSD system, but I wanted to keep php usage to the bare minimum.
    • Not to mention sheer speed of the statically generated websites, it's really hard to beat.
  • Being able to write directly in Markdown also helps a lot. I use aforementioned Folding Text for the outlines (like this entire post, essentially), Drafts for, well, drafts and iA Writer for finalizing the post.
    • Yeah, I use git hooks for the deployment 👌🏻
  • The switch happened already some time ago but should you notice anything broken or misbehaving be sure to reach out.

Miscellaneous

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  • Dark mode is now available on the blog. It follows the OS settings as I feel internal pain whenever I think about implementing any kind of switch in JavaScript. Sorry not sorry.
    • On that note, I'm loosely following Tomorrow theme palettes. Dark mode in particular is using Tomorrow Night Blue.
  • Links page has been redesigned and updated with all the changes in my RSS feed reader.
  • Podcasts page has been updated to follow the latest changes in my podcast habits. It's been more difficult for me to keep up with all the shows I used to -- this is due to cut in my commute time. One notable re-introduction is Linux Action News 🎉

  1. And recently available free of charge. ↩︎

  2. I'm currently running on single module (8G) as I was hitting some weird CKSUM errors in my zpool. Removing one module, so far, fixed these issues but I still have some more testing ahead of me planned. ↩︎

  3. I migrated to the wonderful Gitolite. ↩︎