Today I Learned

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 currently [[replacing-google-search-apps-with-self-hosted-web-apps]] and decided to create a simple b64 encoder/decoder, just start typing to enter text, escape to deselect, then e/d to encode/decode.

I’m trying to make these apps super simple, self hosted out of minio, static html, and javascript. It’s been fun to get back to some simple interactive web development like this. No build just a website that does something. No broken builds, no containers to deploy, just push to minio.

encoded = btoa(content);
decoded = atob(encoded);

Here is the result.

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();

I’ve been working on ninesui, inspired by k9s see thoughts-633. I want a good flow for making video for the readme and I am using charm.sh’s vhs for this. Its running in an archBTW distrobox and looks gawdaweful.

The over saturated colors give it a really retro look, seems fine, but not my cup of tea. I tried to change the textual theme to tokyo-night and it might have made it a bit better, but still over-saturated.

After #

What I found is that vhs has themes, setting it to dracula made everything much better.

# sort.tape
Output assets/sort.mp4
Output assets/sort.gif

Require echo

Set Shell "bash"
Set FontSize 32
Set Width 1920
Set Height 1080
+ Set Theme 'Dracula'

NinesUI #

I’m using these in my ninesui project, right now they are in the readme, but maybe some docs will grow eventually. Right now its hardcore explore phase.

I’m trying to learn proper logs, monitoring, otel, and grafana. Today I imported a bunch of pre-made k8s dashboards and made a few of my own for specific apps, and it made me want to know how I can turn my own custom dashboards into infrastructure as code. Turns out grafana makes it pretty easy to do this, if you have the grafana dashboard sidecar running. It will pick up any ConfigMap with the grafana_dashboard label and import it.

Go to Dashboards -> Pick a Dashboard -> Export -> JSON.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: my-dashboard
  namespace: meta
  labels:
    grafana_dashboard: "1"
data:
  my-dashboard.json: |
    {
      "annotations": {
        "list": [
      ...
      "uid": "fel2uhjhepg5ce",
      "version": 3
    }

I’ve been using ruff to lint my python code for quite awhile now, I was pretty early to jump on it after release. Some of my projects have had a nice force-single-line setting and some have not. I dug into the docs and it was not clear what I needed to make it work.

[tool.ruff]
select = ['I'] # you probably want others as well

[tool.ruff.isort]
force-single-line = true

Turns out I was missing Isort in the select list.

I was looking back at my analytics page today and wondered what were my posts about back at the beginning. My blog is managed by markata so I looked at a few ways you could pull those posts up. Turns out it’s pretty simple to do, use the markata map with a filter.

from markata import Markata

m.map('title, slug, date', filter='date.year==2016', sort='date')

the filter is python eval that should evaluate to a boolean, all of the

Result #

[
    ('⭐ jupyterlab jupyterlab', 'jupyterlab-jupyterlab', datetime.date(2016, 12, 13)),
    ('⭐ nickhould tidy-data-python', 'nickhould-tidy-data-python', datetime.date(2016, 12, 9)),
    (
        '⭐ mikeckennedy write-pythonic-code-demos',
        'mikeckennedy-write-pythonic-code-demos',
        datetime.date(2016, 11, 22)
    ),
    (
        '⭐ mikeckennedy write-pythonic-code-for-better-data-science-webcast',
        'mikeckennedy-write-pythonic-code-for-better-data-science-webcast',
        datetime.date(2016, 11, 22)
    ),
    ('⭐ rajshah4 dlgroup', 'rajshah4-dlgroup', datetime.date(2016, 11, 18)),
    ('⭐ pandas-dev pandas', 'pandas-dev-pandas', datetime.date(2016, 10, 5))
]

You could use the list command as well right within your shell and the same map and filters work.

⬢ [devtainer-0.1.3] ❯ markata list --map title --filter='date.year==2016'
[22:35:06] 2088/2145 posts skipped                                                                       skip.py:36
           57/2145 posts not skipped                                                                     skip.py:37

⭐ pandas-dev pandas
⭐ rajshah4 dlgroup
⭐ mikeckennedy write-pythonic-code-for-better-data-science-webcast
⭐ mikeckennedy write-pythonic-code-demos
⭐ nickhould tidy-data-python
⭐ jupyterlab jupyterlab

You could also do it with jin right inside of a markdown post using the jinja_md plugin.

{% raw %}
{% for title, slug, date in markata.map('title, slug, date', filter='date.year==2016', sort='date') %}
* [{{title}}]({{slug}}) - {{date}}
{% endfor %}
{% endraw %}

You do have to `jinja: true` in the frontmatter of the post.

Result #

{% for title, slug, date in markata.map(’title, slug, date’, filter=‘date.year==2016’, sort=‘date’) %}

• {{title}} - {{date}} {% endfor %}

Using pbpaste for command substitution keeps sensitive or long URLs out of your shell history. Instead of typing git clone https://github.com/user/repo-with-long-name.git, copy the URL to clipboard and run git clone "$(pbpaste)". This prevents the URL from appearing in ~/.bash_history or ~/.zsh_history.

To get pbpaste working on both Xorg and Wayland, add this to your shell config:

if [[ $(command -v wl-copy) ]]; then
    alias pbcopy='wl-copy'
    pbpaste() { wl-paste; }
elif [[ $(command -v xclip) ]]; then
    alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard'
    pbpaste() { xclip -selection clipboard -o; }
fi

The function approach (instead of alias) enables command substitution, while the quotes around $(pbpaste) handle spaces and special characters safely.

Now you can use it.

git clone "$(pbpaste)"

More importantly secrets can stay out of your history.

export GITHUB_TOKEN="$(pbpaste)"
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="$(pbpaste)"
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="$(pbpaste)"
export DATABASE_URL="$(pbpaste)"

I run tailwind for my personal blog, whenever I update it, pre-commit goes in and fixes end of file. I’m sick of these things fighting each other, since it is a generated app it is going to et ignored from pre-commit from now on.

exclude: ^static/app.*\.css$
repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks
    rev: v2.4.0
    hooks:
      - id: trailing-whitespace
      - id: end-of-file-fixer
      - id: check-yaml
      - id: check-added-large-files

I’m building in a [[ fragmentions ]] implementation into my blog, I wanted to add some text before the fragment to indidate that it was the highlighted fragment that someone may have intended to share with you.

To get a newline in a :before I need to use \A and white-space: pre-line.

body :target::before,
body [fragmention]::before {
    content: "Highlighted Fragment:\A";
    white-space: pre-line;
    @apply font-bold text-yellow-600;
}

Here is what it looks like on my not yet live implementation of fragmentions.

Testing fresh nvim installs can be a pain, and hard to di without borking your known good install. I’ve been using NVIM_APPNAME to run a test nvim in a sandbox that wont bork my main install. This usually runs for me in under a minute, can be down under 15s if I remove some of the TreeSitter installs at the end. This beats a full docker build of my full devtainer to test out nvim packaging woes.

rm ~/.cache/wwtest -rf
rm ~/.local/share/wwtest -rf
rm ~/.config/wwtest -rf
cp -r nvim/.config/nvim/ ~/.config/wwtest
NVIM_APPNAME=wwtest nvim --headless "+Lazy sync" +qa
NVIM_APPNAME=wwtest nvim --headless "+TSUpdateSync" "+sleep 5000m" +qa
NVIM_APPNAME=wwtest nvim --headless "+MasonUpdate" +qa
NVIM_APPNAME=wwtest nvim --headless "+TSInstallSync! c cpp go lua python rust tsx javascript typescript vimdoc vim bash yaml toml vue just" +qa
NVIM_APPNAME=wwtest nvim --headless "+MasonInstall lua-language-server rustywind ruff ruff-lsp html-lsp typescript-language-server beautysh fixjson isort markdownlint stylua yamlfmt python-lsp-server" +qa
NVIM_APPNAME=wwtest nvim

I’ve started to use this as a just recipe to run before deploying a new version of my dotfiles. So far its pairing nicely with nvim-manager

When I want to put a date in a document like a blog post from vim I use !!date from insert mode. Note that entering !! from normal mode puts you in command mode with :.! filled out. This runs a shell command, i.e. date for this example.

It outputs the following

Fri Jan 31 08:46:11 PM CST 2025

You can also pass in a date such as tommorrow by pasdding in the -d date -d tomorrow.

It outputs the following

Sat Feb 1 08:53:20 PM CST 2025

codeium just taught me this one with autocomplete

:put =strftime('%Y-%m-%d')

This outputs the following

2025-01-31

What I like about the :put =strftime( method is that you can add a format, but that is a lot more for me to remember than !!date

A few weeks later #

I’m going through a bunch of blog posts and dont want my date formats to change to the Wed Feb format so I broke down and made these keybindings. I think I’m still going to be using .!date a lot, but these keybindings will be nice for editing blog post frontmatter.

set("n", "<leader>dd", "<cmd>put =strftime('%Y-%m-%d')<cr>", { noremap = true, silent = true })
set("n", "<leader>dt", "<cmd>put =strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')<cr>", { noremap = true, silent = true })

• dd 2025-02-12
• dt 2025-02-12 12:53:47
• :.!date Wed Feb 12 12:53:47 PM CST 2025

Today I ran into an interesting question, why am I being asked to configure tzdata while installing npm. Turns out that the aptitude cli has a why command that very handily nails down why you have something installed on a debian based system.

Install aptitude #

apt install aptitude

Why tzdata #

Now we can query why we need tzdata and see the full chain with the root package being npm.

root@47685221fb82:/# aptitude why tzdata
i   npm        Depends  node-gyp
i A node-gyp   Depends  gyp (>= 0.1+20200513gitcaa6002)
i A gyp        Depends  python3:any
i A python3    Provides python3:any
i A python3    Depends  python3.12 (>= 3.12.3-0~)
i A python3.12 Depends  tzdata

Today I ran into this interactive prompt on ubuntu while installing node and npm, and I do not want to manually configure this interactively every time I run an install, moreso in docker I do not have the interactive terminal to do so.

Configuring tzdata
------------------

Please select the geographic area in which you live. Subsequent configuration questions will narrow this down by presenting a list of cities, representing the time zones in which they are located.

  1. Africa  2. America  3. Antarctica  4. Arctic  5. Asia  6. Atlantic  7. Australia  8. Europe  9. Indian  10. Pacific  11. Etc  12. Legacy
Geographic area:

Why tzdata #

Checking aptitude why tzdata it shows that the chain goes back through npm.

root@47685221fb82:/# aptitude why tzdata
i   npm        Depends  node-gyp
i A node-gyp   Depends  gyp (>= 0.1+20200513gitcaa6002)
i A gyp        Depends  python3:any
i A python3    Provides python3:any
i A python3    Depends  python3.12 (>= 3.12.3-0~)
i A python3.12 Depends  tzdata

The solution, configure tzdata #

export TZ="America/Chicago"
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
apt update
apt install tzdata -y
ln -fs /usr/share/zoneinfo/$TZ /etc/localtime
dpkg-reconfigure -f noninteractive tzdata

This is required, because apt installing tzdata will trigger the

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03KsS09YS4E&t=610s

Today I learned about the basic calculator, bc. At the very end of this video prime uses it to add numbers in vim.

REPL #

You can start a calculator repl at the command line, by running bc.

Vim #

Since bc supports standard unix pipes you can easily pipe data from vim into bc and back out using !!bc. All you need is a string of math on the line you want to calculate, go to normal mode and run !!bc to get the answer.

Traditionally I will open my system calculator or ipython to do something like this.

To keep the equation and the result in the same line you can send the equation to stderr and the result to stdout using tee.

:.!tee >(cat >&2) | bc

I’ve been back to putting some images on my blog lately and thinking about making them a bit thinner through the use of aspect ratio for simplicity. I’m leaning pretty heavy on tailwindcss these days due to some weird quirks of markdown-it-attrs I cannot have slashes in classes from markdown so I made a .cinematic class to achieve this.

.cinematic {
  @apply aspect-[2.39/1];
}

Example

Attrs does not like ‘/’ characters in its classes, so to use some tailwind classes with custom values we must make new classes in our tailwind input css.

.cinematic {
  @apply aspect-[2.39/1];
}

Given the following markdown with attrs added to the image and to the paragraph block.

![screenshot-2025-01-31T14-50-00-094Z.png](https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/api/file/50cfa8dc-9d46-4f02-877b-688fa5510a83.png){.aspect-[2.39/1]}

![screenshot-2025-01-31T14-50-00-094Z.png](https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/api/file/50cfa8dc-9d46-4f02-877b-688fa5510a83.png){.cinematic}

{.cinematic}
![screenshot-2025-01-31T14-50-00-094Z.png](https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/api/file/50cfa8dc-9d46-4f02-877b-688fa5510a83.png)

We get the following output with only the middle one working correctly.

{.aspect-[2.39/1]}

The inline version of `.cinematic` works, but `.aspect-[2.39/1]` does not,

I built out a tool for myself to manage my nvim configuration, and I wanted to quickly see which one I am running in my starship prompt. Here’s the config I ended up with. It warns if the NVIM_APPNAME environment variable is not set, and it shows which nvim I am using if it is set.

[custom.nvim-manager-system]
when = '[[ ! -n "${NVIM_APPNAME}" ]]'
style = "bold yellow"
symbol = '[ ](fg:#15AABF)'
format = '$symbol[USING SYSTEM NVIM]($style)'

[env_var.NVIM_APPNAME]
style = "green"
symbol = '[ ](fg:#15AABF)'
format = '[$symbol${env_value}]($style)'
variable = "NVIM_APPNAME"

I recently noticed that my og images were missing emoji. They were taken using headless chrome in a container. I fixed it by adding an emoji font in the containerfile / dockerfile.

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    # Add fonts with emoji support
    fonts-noto-color-emoji \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

Before #

Here’s what they were looking like with broken emoji fonts.

After #

And now with the fixed emoji font.