Of late I’ve been experimenting with HomeAssistant, a self-hosted home automation system. It started as a way to get a working doorbell without needing to rip the walls open, and I’ve been gradually adding new features like spoken reminders to put the chickens to bed.

This is part of a series of posts on using MPD to set up remote speakers controlled by HomeAssistant on various devices. This post covers the Google OnHub, specifically the TP-Link variant (whirlwind) running OpenWRT.

This is part of a series of posts on using MPD to set up remote speakers controlled by HomeAssistant on various devices. This post covers NixOS; specifically, a home theatre PC (pladix) running NixOS and connected to speakers via HDMI.

This is part of a series of posts on using MPD to set up remote speakers controlled by HomeAssistant on various devices. This post covers Android; specifically, three old android devices (bullhead, sargo, and flox) running LineageOS.

I’ve posted previously about terminal image viewing, with a particular emphasis on viewing image links in weechat. For the past few years I’ve been using an approach that doesn’t open them in the terminal at all, but I’ve continued using timg for fast image previews outside of weechat.

Over the years I’ve ended up with an assortment of phones that are no longer fit for purpose – maybe the touchscreen is held together with tape, or they stopped getting security updates years ago, or the camera lens is shattered. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t still useful for other things!

Airsonic is a web-based music player. I’ve tinkered around with a lot of options over the years and keep coming back to Airsonic; the UI is kind of clunky, but it has a bunch of features that I can’t seem to find anywhere else without serious compromises. In particular:

• it lets me browse the music collection based on filesystem layout, rather than relying solely on embedded metadata (my collection is well tagged in general, but the filesystem layout encodes some information not present in the tags, and some of my music is in formats that don’t support tags at all)
• it defaults to playing music on the client through the browser, rather than being a remote control for speakers attached to the server
• it has a mobile client that supports downloading music for later offline play

My daughter has been getting me back into Minecraft with her, so I set up a private server we could both play on. And since it’s me, I also installed a whole bunch of mods, including Immersive Engineering, Tinker’s Construct, Beyond Earth, and Productive Bees, a beekeeping mod that lets you attract, capture, and/or breed a wide variety of bees that produce various useful resources.

Last fall I posted about a javascript injection for adding useful read markers to the Ubooquity comic server. I haven’t been idle since then, since I kept tripping over areas for improvement while trying to read things, and I’ve finally gotten around to cleaning up and releasing those improvements:

I use weechat for IRC (and a bunch of other chat systems). It runs on a remote server, and I connect to it with ssh -t tmux attach, and all is well.

The public DoomRL server I host now supports sound and music, as long as you’re playing it in the browser (as opposed to connecting via telnet). If you don’t care about the technical details and just want to play, you can stop reading now – sound is enabled by default for browser games.

Ubooquity is a web-based comic and ebook reader; I’ve never tested the ebook support, since I have an e-ink reader for that, but the comic support works well, and I run a local instance. However, the whole thing is pretty barebones, and missing features common in other readers like Perfect Viewer. The most aggravating lack, I found, was the lack of read-markers; it remembers where you are in each book, but doesn’t tell you (in the book selection window) which ones you have and haven’t finished.

I enjoy the occasional idle/incremental game. I generally prefer the relatively short ones with clearly defined goals and story arcs, like Spaceplan or Paperclips, but I do enjoy larger ones like Trimps or KittensGame on occasion (although I have finished neither of those, and probably never will). Of late, my poison of choice has been BitBurner, a cyberpunk incremental that is less about playing the game directly and more about writing javascript (or anything else you care to write that compiles to JS) to play the game for you.

For a while I’ve wanted a better solution to personal file sharing. Just tossing stuff into /srv/www works, but makes it hard to isolate files shared with one person from files shared with anyone else. Nor does it have a good UX for sharing photo galleries, or a convenient way to say “shove all these files into a zip and share that”. Using Google Drive and Google Photos solves that, but has issues of its own, like making it easy to leak personal information and not having a line client.

I run ZFS on my server, and that means I’m often looking at the output of zpool status, especially when shuffling drives around. Out of the box, however, it’s kind of bland and has lots of wasted space:

Git – like many other Linux programs – has a bunch of subcommands. You never run git on its own; you always git <verb>, e.g. git commit or git log. Under the hood these are handled by hyphenated commands: git-commit, git-log, etc. This is fairly standard; it’s a UI paradigm used by other version control systems, backup software, the ZFS and mdraid tools, taskwarrior, beets, and so forth.

I recently migrated the family server, ancilla, to new hardware and new disks. This post is primarily a record of that process. Hopefully it will be helpful to someone; I suspect it will, at least, be useful to Future Me when planning the next migration.

ZFS and NixOS are two great tastes that taste great together, if you configure all of your ZFS datasets as mountpoint=legacy and list them in configuration.nix. Having done this, the NixOS boot scripts are able to import and mount anything mandatory for boot (notably, /nix), and systemd is made aware of the mountpoints and can ensure that before it starts a service, all the datasets that service uses are mounted.

Plex is a popular media server. I switched to it (from Kodi + a bunch of network shares) a while ago, primarily because it supports server-side transcoding, meaning I can watch things that the itty bitty RPis I use as media players just don’t have the beef to decode, like 1080p HEVC files.

My approach to IRC (and a number of other chat systems, like Discord and Stack Exchange) is to run WeeChat on my server inside tmux. This is very convenient for me; I don’t need to configure multiple chat clients, each with their own UI paradigms and credentials, on every machine I use, I just need to ssh home and tmux attach.

Morroblivion itself isn’t too hard to install, but it can rapidly go out of control once you realize (a) how much better a few mods make the Oblivion UI and (b) how many bugfixes for Morroblivion exist that haven’t been merged into the main ESP yet. (b) is especially pernicious because the Morroblivion forums have lots of threads about mods and fixes for it, but rarely if ever do they make it clear which ones are still useful and which ones have been obsoleted by subsequent Morroblivion releases.

Morroblivion is a fan-made remake of Morrowind in the Oblivion engine. It works by running an installer that automatically converts the TES3 data to TES4 format, in conjunction with about 2GB of mod data that overhauls the textures, models, and so forth, either by replacing them with high quality originals or remapping them to Oblivion equivalents, and recreates feature from Morrowind that Oblivion doesn’t support natively using the scripting system, like cast-on-use enchantments.

In general, there’s four ways to install software in Nix:

The NixOS installer is, well, there isn’t one as such; there’s no guided installation program like you get with (say) SUSE or Ubuntu. The good news is that the actual process of installation is very quick and straightforward if you’re comfortable managing partitions and mountpoints by hand:

So I recently learned about NixOS. A lot has been written about the philosophical underpinnings of its “purely functional package manager” Nix; I’m more interested in the practical aspects, in particular the combination of one central (version-controllable) location to define the entire system with fast, painless rollbacks to any previous configuration. I’m already using Ansible, which kind of gets me the first of these, but not really; the actual state of the system is defined by the ansible configuration + whatever changes have accumulated to things that ansible doesn’t touch as packages get upgraded and tweaks get made that I forget to add to ansible. In contrast, in Nix most of the system (in particular, most of /etc) is read-only; you must make edits to /etc/nixos/ in order to change the configuration of the rest of the system.

So you’re hosting your own MX for what I’m sure are very good reasons. But the spam is killing you. You don’t want to migrate all your email (and users) to Google, but you’d gladly pay, say, $5/month for Google spam filtering and continue hosting the MX yourself.

The PSP may be ten years old, but there’s still a lot you can do with it. This post is documentation for my adventures with custom firmware (CFW) on the PSP.

doomrl-server now supports closed captions, via a library that replaces libSDL_mixer. These are enabled by default on the ancilla DoomRL server.

The thing I originally wrote it for (easily launching emulators via a controller) is no longer something we need, and the thing we ended up using it for in practice (watching videos) is now better served by Kodi (formerly XBMC).

The release is available, as usual, via Github. There’s only one significant change in this release, but it’s a big one: file metadata and directory listings are now stored in per-directory .emufun.cache files rather than a central per-user file.

Go get it on Github! This is a dgamelaunch-like telnet frontend for Doom: The Roguelike, allowing people to play DoomRL over telnet with recordings, spectator mode and shared high scores.

ifIRC 0.2.0 features a complete rewrite of command line handling using tools.cli 0.3.1. It now has sensible defaults for various command line flags and doesn’t use the positional arguments.

ifIRC, the ifMUD <-> IRC proxy, has now been officially released, after a bunch of restructuring to improve reliability and remove the dependence on the Saturnine library. I’ve been using it locally for about a year, but haven’t considered it ready for general use until now.

To celebrate the SS1 20th Anniversary Devstream – and because I’ve been meaning to do this for a while – the System Shock maps I’ve been generating are now searchable by object name. You can search just the current level, or (if using the “all levels” map file) the entire game. The search will show both the location of the objects themselves, and the location of any containers that they’re in.