Archive

You can unset multiple environment variables at once. I did not know this was a thing, its something that ended up happening organically on a call and asking someone to run unset. They had never done it before and did not know how it works, but did exactly as I said instead of what I meant. I like this handy shortcut doing it in one line rather than each one individually, I will be using this in the future. You might need this for something like running aws cli commands with localstack.

unset AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY AWS_DEFAULT_REGION

i3lock is a fantastic lockscreen for tiling window managers.

If you are using a tiling window manager within a public space you need to add a lockscreen. I have one machine that I take with me to a public space. Its secure enough that I can leave it, but not secure enough that I want to leave it unlocked. So when I need to leave it behind for the restroom I need to lock it up.

arch wiki

paru -S i3lock
# or
apt install i3lock

Now that you have i3lock installed lets lock that screen.

# lock it with a pure white flashbang
i3lock

# lock it with a black background
i3lock -c 000000

# lock it with a custom color
i3lock -c 2e1330

# lock it with a wallpaper
i3lock -c 000000 ~/Pictures/Wallpapers/mywallpaper.png

You can use your window manager or something more generic like xbindkeys to set a hotkey. This way you don’t have to open a terminal and type out the command every time you leave your desk. You can just press something like SUPER+L like you would on other OS’s.

Fancy #

If you like it a bit fancier, you can use i3lock-fancy, it can blur, pixelate, and greyscale your current screen. I did not really like this because you can still tell what is going on the screen. It’s probably secure enough and looks better, but I went with regular i3lock.

paru -S i3lock-fancy-git
# or
apt install i3lock-fancy

If you need to target a specific k8s node in the cluster, you can use labels. You want to treat your nodes as much like cattle as you can, but sometimes budgets get in the way. You might be like me and just run any free hardware you can get in your cluster, or you might have some large storage or gpu needs that you can’t afford to put on every node in the cluster.

kubectl get nodes --show-labels

# add the bigpool label
kubectl label node k8s-1 bigpool=true
kubectl get nodes --show-labels

# remove the bigpool label
kubectl label node k8s-1 bigpool-

To use the label in a pod set spec.nodeSelector to the label that you applied.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: busybox
spec:
  containers:
  - name: busybox
    image: busybox
  nodeSelector:
    bigpool: "true"

I’m trying to replace my usage of google inline search apps with real apps, today I used a stopwatch to time some things out at work by opening stopwatch. This was something I just wanted running in a tab on another screen, it was not timing running code or anything, I was using it as a reminder to check browser caches every 5 minutes or so for some testing.

So tonight I whipped up a stopwatch, clock and timer, all of which are using the wakelock API to keep the screen on while the app is running.

    // Wake Lock support
    let wakeLock = null;
    async function requestWakeLock() {
      try {
        if ('wakeLock' in navigator) {
          wakeLock = await navigator.wakeLock.request('screen');
          console.log("Wake lock acquired");
        }
      } catch (err) {
        console.error("Wake lock error:", err);
      }
    }

    document.addEventListener("visibilitychange", () => {
      if (wakeLock !== null && document.visibilityState === "visible") {
        requestWakeLock();
      }
    });

    requestWakeLock();