• Learning Rust

    Many programmers like learning programming languages. It’s fun to discover new concepts and possibilities and to be able to use them to write more elegant, more powerful or more efficient programs. I had enjoyed this activity too, until I discovered Common Lisp many years ago. Once I learned Common Lisp, my passion for learning new […]

  • Software problem: Deleting Btrfs subvolumes

    Internet is no longer full of Btrfs horror stories so I decided to use Btrfs when I reinstalled my desktop computer with NixOS. It has some nice features, like subvolumes, compression and cooperation with Podman. I still prefer ZFS but due to its weird license it’s not included in Linux and one can fall into […]

  • Software problem: Compiling Emacs vterm module on NixOS

    I started using NixOS again some time ago. The fact that NixOS doesn’t use Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is sometimes a big source of pain and complications. One non-obvious thing for beginners is how to compile a C program. One C program that is very useful and must be compiled locally is emacs-libvterm C module, providing […]

  • Software problem: Music players on Android

    One might thing that making a program that plays music stored locally on a computer shouldn’t be that difficult. It must be able to find music files, to play them correctly, to play songs in the correct order, and provide a decent user interface, with some search capabilities. Considering that the most difficult tasks can […]

  • Software problem: Missing virt-manager icons

    virt-manager on my NixOS system was missing icons on most of its buttons, making the application handling somewhat difficult. A little stupid annoying problem, apparently of category 3, has wasted several hours of my life. I reported it as a NixOS bug. NixOS people responded quickly and were helpful so after a couple of days […]

  • Debian builds with Podman

    Since I no longer have Debian on my desktop computer, I had to arrange an environment for building Debian packages. I could use a virtual machine running Debian for that purpose but this would have several disadvantages: It would consume unnecessarily much resources. I would have to use a nested build environment such as cowbuilder […]

  • Software problem: Lost network in a Podman container

    I use Podman for running various stuff. It’s sometimes challenging due to problems of all categories. One special problem I experienced on one of my computers was that if a container had stopped and then was started again, it lost its network interface, only loopback interface remained available. I searched the web and hoped it […]

  • Moving to Podman

    Until recently, I used to use chroot, schroot and LXC to run my nested Linux environments. I’ve never used Docker, which has always looked like a single-purpose and quite limited tool to me. I started looking more deeply at Podman last year. I realized that this kind of technology can be mature enough now to […]

  • Software problem: KDE Wallet

    When I reinstalled my desktop computer, KDE started asking me for a wallet password. Each time a short while after I started my web browser. It didn’t look all right: I don’t think I’ve ever set a wallet password and I deleted whole KDE configuration after I had reinstalled the computer. I couldn’t see any […]

  • Software problem: Wahoo mobile application

    I wanted to make a bike trip, planned it on komoot and, just before the trip, tried to synchronize the route to my Wahoo ELEMNT. It didn’t work, the Wahoo device couldn’t connect to WiFi. WiFi problems with Wahoo are not uncommon so I tried to use Wahoo mobile application to download my route. The […]