How to Undervolt a Laptop (with NixOS)
Sometimes your laptop might run too hot and you want to reduce the temperatures.
Apart from cleaning the fans and changing the thermal paste, there are 2 software options available to you.
Programming
Race conditions with asyncio in Python
What do you think the output of the following code will be?
Setting up Fedora with a Windows VM
This is a short guide on how to setup Fedora with a Windows VM via libvirt, optionally sharing a RAID-1 Btrfs volume from the host to the Windows guest via SAMBA. I'm assuming you are coming from Windows.
Reasons why you might want to do this:
- Windows is quite annoying.
- With Looking Glass, you can passthrough your GPU to the Windows guest and enjoy native graphics performance.
- The Btrfs filesystem allows snapshotting, checksumming and multi-disk RAID with an unequal number/size of drives.
- You can snapshot the entire Windows VM and revert to it anytime.
GPU Power Crashes
For a few months, while running my Windows 11 VM with a GPU passthrough-ed, I was getting random reboots/screen hangs. There was a clear pattern - the reboots/hangs occured whenever I launched a resource-intensive application on the VM, such as a game.
In an effort to trace down the problem, I looked through dmesg (truncated for brevity) for various boots:
Syncing my Kindle with calibre-web, KOReader and Syncthing
I own an Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2nd generation). For the longest time, I was looking for a solution that would enable me to sync my reading progress between my phone and Kindle, as well as transfer books between all devices wirelessly.
I finally managed to accomplish this with Syncthing, KOReader and Calibre-Web.
Syncthing Topology
I use Syncthing, a peer-to-peer filesharing program for my devices (most recently on my Kindle as well). There are a few network topologies possible in such a setup.
Yjs vs Traditional Databases
Yjs is a conflict-free, replicated data type, which allows for distributed, collaborative editing and offline synchronization, with automatic conflict resolution.
It can also be used as a database backend.
Recently, I was deciding between Yjs and the Prisma + tRPC + SQLite combination. As it was a small todo-style app, I settled on Yjs.
Here are the factors I considered for this decision.
Video Archiving with FFmpeg
I keep most of my photos and videos on Photoprism, a great open-source Google Photos alternative with features like facial recognition and viewing photos by location.
Setting up the Mikrotik hAP ac² with Singel Fibre
The Mikrotik family of routers are known for their extensive configurability, offering enterprise level features such as PoE, custom routes, VLANs and more. It runs a custom Linux distribution known as RouterOS which offers a WebGUI and terminal interface, as well as SSH.
I wanted to replace my old Singtel WiFi Gigabit Router AC Elite, after it started intermittently dying.
Music Management with Navidrome, DSub and Beets
Previously on Windows, I was using MediaMonkey to manage my music. It offered wireless syncing (over LAN) for the associated Android client, and worked well.
When I switched to Linux, I had to look for a replacement. I wanted a solution that was free and open-source, could be self-hosted on a server, and supported features such as bookmarks, playlists and transcoding (for clients not supporting certain formats).