Let’s start with a tricky one: what distro do I use on my desktops? If you know me, then you know I like to distro-hop fairly frequently just to kinda get a feel for what’s going on in the Linux ecosystem. However, I do tend to fallback on Linux Mint the most. It scratches the itch of having a slow-moving base system but also provides more up-to-date packages for frequently used apps like Firefox, and their implementation of the Cinnamon desktop really is quite nice. Also, a major plus is it also gets a lot of third-party software and community support simply by being based on Ubuntu, and the importance of this cannot be overstated. Want to run a weird app? It’s got an Ubuntu download. Have a weird issue? The community’s likely got a fix for you. Heck you can even use AMD’s proprietary drivers on Mint, which are notorious being a pain in the ass to install, so long as you upgrade to the Ubuntu HWE kernel.
Full stop, if you’re looking for a distro to try out and you haven’t yet, or if you’re just a new user switching to Linux for the first time, I’d highly recommend Linux Mint. It really is a solid distro with a stable base (based on Ubuntu LTS), important apps like Firefox get updates instead of being an ESR release, it provides fantastic GUI tools like Driver Manager and Update Manager for those who don’t want to use a terminal, and you don’t have to worry about snaps or flatpaks if you don’t want to.
That said, currently I’m running Manjaro on my gaming PC/workstation and both of my laptops. The reasoning for this was, frankly, I was getting bored of Linux Mint, and I was seeing too many small-but-weird things cropping up, so I decided to mix things up. It had been awhile since I used Manjaro, so I gave it a try… and boy after installing it on my Galago Pro was I happy! My major gripe of the past - that I was having trouble mounting Samba shares for some inexplicable reason - was gone, and once I touched up my setup shell script for some new software additions (notably Pulsar) I was able to pretty much get going within like an hour. I don’t know if this will be my mainstay, but I am pretty happy with it so far, and I can swap between desktop environments (yes I’m one of those weirdos that has like 100 DEs installed on my systems) freely without weird quirks popping up, like GNOME not going to sleep properly or display scaling acting inconsistently in KDE.
In a way, my server usage is simpler… but also more complex? As a baseline, everything in my homelab runs on Debian stable, and this is for a few reasons:
The tl;dr is just that I love Debian and Debian loves me. But I do also have a couple other OSes running in my homelab, those being AlmaLinux/Rocky Linux, and FreeBSD. I always liked playing with CentOS and having a system that could run for several years without needing a major upgrade, and when CloudLinux got their replacement (AlmaLinux) out a few months later I hopped on that bandwagon and tried it out. Surprisingly everything just worked as expected, and I’ve had several servers running it since then. I’ve recently started doodling around with Rocky Linux now that RHEL 9 is out, but of course the RHEL-clones are again going through turmoil with Red Hat closing their source code, I feel like it’s best to move off of a product that the upstream wants to kill off. It sucks, it was a great community that formed around it, but it is what it is. Fuck IBM.
FreeBSD only runs my internal mail relays and I think something else? I really like FreeBSD for what it offers - it satisfies the curmudgeon-side of me that hates a lot of SystemD’s parts - but a lot of the tooling that I use on a daily basis either for work or video editing either requires or just runs on Linux. So there isn’t a whole lot of want on my end to fully switch over to FreeBSD, especially since I’d lose access to Docker.
This is related to my homelab but I felt deserved its own section since it’s its own rabbit hole of “what works best for X?” I’m actually running both of the popular DIY NAS operating systems in my lab - unRAID and TrueNAS. My TrueNAS system is actually an old FreeNAS system I built back in the day using five 3TB WD Red drives, is currently housing 6TB Seagate Ironwolf drives, and is undergoing a transition to 8TB drives to squeeze a little more space out of it. I use this primarily as my “personal” NAS, where I store my TV shows, movies, music, and personal documents, and I also have a RAIDz mirror of two 1TB SSDs hosting my virtual machine disks. This thing has served me very well for about seven years now, and has undergone numerous hardware upgrades, drive failures and subsequent replacements, and OS/ZFS updates. It really is a solid product.
The unRAID system I built to be my “Bit Goblin” NAS, which I use strictly for my Bit Goblin video file share and any files pertaining to the channel. This was built with unRAID for a couple reasons: I really wanted the ability to build up the array with new drives over time as I could afford them (I just bought a house and my budget was tight), and, like a lot of my projects, I just wanted to play around with something new. I didn’t initially (and still don’t) need the extra performance a proper ZFS array would grant me over unRAID’s setup that only really nets you one drive’s worth of performance at a time, so I prioritized the expansion abilities provided by unRAID. It sucks that it costs money, but hey, good software doesn’t grow on trees, and so far I’ve been pretty happy with it.
I will mention that I also have a future plan to convert my “Bit Goblin” NAS into an archive/backup server and create a separate NAS with TrueNAS and a better caching setup when the time comes that I need extra performance. Which may come when I move to editing 4K video, or if I am able to hire a couple of video editors at some point, but again this is a potential plan for the future and nothing is set in stone yet. Who knows if I’ll even get to that point!
To summarize: I generally use Linux Mint on my PCs though Manjaro might take over the daily driver role soon, and I primarily use Debian in my homelab alongside a smattering of FreeBSD and RHEL-clones that might be getting phased out soon. Simple enough, right?
]]>Personally, I LOVE building websites from the ground up. Not necessarily coding everything from scratch, but at least starting from something barebones that’s extensible enough so I can plug-n-play my own choice of tools to make that’s tailored to me. This is why when I need to make a website, depending on the requirements I’ll use frameworks like Slim (PHP), Express.js (Node.js), Gin (Go), and the like - minimalist frameworks (or routers…) that I can plug in things like templating engines, an ORM or some sort of database abstraction layer, and authentication mechanisms.
I also firmly believe that NOT every single website needs to be built to accept user inputs, or dynamically generate web pages on the fly; sometimes you only need a simple, static webpage or set of webpages that are small, concise, and quick to load.
This is where static website generators come into play, and I went with Jekyll. It’s a really neat tool that combines the magic of the Liquid templating engine with the simplicity of markdown files to create a static, blog-aware site. Heck, it’s so cool that it’s used by GitHub! It’s how they generate webpages for GitHub Pages!
Part of what makes Jekyll great is its extensibility. There are plugins available for things like compiling SASS/SCSS stylesheets and CoffeeScript, generating RSS feeds and sitemaps, displaying GitHub Gists, and many other things to help you in generating your site. Plus, there are community-maintained themes that can be used to give yourself a headstart with designing your site so you can focus on the content rather than the boring CSS designing junk.
It does require some setup to get your site scaffolding and templating setup, especially if you want to use other tools like CoffeeScript to compile your JavaScript scripts (that’s me!) and want to change your templating engine. But, once you’ve got your site configured, creating a new blog post is as simple as creating a new markdown file in your _posts folder, fill out the post metadata, add some content and BAM! it’s ready to go.
Also, the developers of Jekyll were smart: they not allow you to build a site into static HTML files to serve on your site, but they also built in a tool to “watch” your source directory for changes and automatically rebuild it on the fly so you can easily see your changes as you’re developing it or writing a new post.
At this point I’d like to mention that I also really like Hugo, which is a static site generator in the same vein as Jekyll. It’s written in Go, so it’s typically a LOT faster to render sites, and it’s also just a single binary so it’s easier to install and maintain a single version that you build your site with.
Now as for why I went with Jekyll: simply just familiarity. I can go into a long debate about the pros and cons of each and talk about why Jekyll fits my use better, but realistically both are FANTASTIC tools that I’d recommend to anyone looking to build a static site. I don’t need your confirmation that I made the correct choice ;).
Well, that’s it for now. I hope you were able to learn something from this - I just wanted to talk about how I created this site with Jekyll since I’m really happy with the setup now. It’s not too fancy, but isn’t boring. Now the next step is integrating it with some CI to automatically deploy new versions of the site…
]]>If you’re here then you likely don’t need a real introduction since you’re probably coming from YouTube or some other platform that you’ve met me on. But either way, in case you don’t already know me, I’m a fun-loving, tech nerd that loves playing with anything relating to computers. Whether it’s networking, system administration, database administration, building PCs, software development… the list goes on, but I love it all. To me, it’s really fun building things and making things do what I want them to, whether it’s to make my life a little bit easier, self-host some services to better safeguard my data, or just for fun. (…it’s mostly for fun!)
The content I post is mostly centered around me just documenting what I’m doing for my own future reference if I ever run into the same problems, and hopefully it helps you out as well or at least gets your gears turning and motivates you to go out and play with tech in your own way.
The primary content that I publish is over on YouTube on my Bit Goblin channel, and I also semi-regularly post videos on Old School RuneScape over on Ascendings. If you prefer watching live content more, then you can head on over to my Twitch channel - I’m not nearly as active over there but I do hop occasionally to interact with you all and have a good time playing games (mostly Old School RuneScape… it’s my favorite game, stop judging me).
I’m also huge into building an inclusive, supportive community for great people to chat, chill and help each other out. In this vein I’ve spun up a Discord server for you all to go hang out in and chat, and I’m currently in the process of spinning up a Minecraft server for you all to play on and a forum for a more laid back, old school-style way to talk to one another and get help. I’m open to spinning up more services for the community, so be sure to let me know if there’s anything you want!
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