I am one of those people who function better by writing things down. One day, I realized that most of my notes don’t have to be private, so here they are - my second brain. Be warned that, if you stumble upon something here that doesn’t make sense to you, it isn’t meant to!
Verify and, if required, enable hardware support for encryption. Configure machine to start up whenever power is restored (after an outage etc.).
It wasn’t exactly rocket science but I updated BIOS for the first time today. High level steps for my Dell desktop: https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us -> Enter “service tag” -> “Drivers & Downloads” -> Choose “Operating system” as “BIOS”. Make sure the BIOS I want to install doesn’t require an older version to be installed first. Put the .exe file on a USB drive that’s formatted as FAT. (ExFAT didn’t work.) Boot the computer, hit F12 when “Dell” is visible and select “BIOS Flash Update”. As of today, latest version installed on my: ...
Install SSHFS. Add something like the following to the /etc/fstab file. (Here, you can put more specific path after the colon in the first term.) [email protected]:foo /mnt/rsync fuse.sshfs noauto,x-systemd.automount,_netdev,IdentityFile=/root/.ssh/id_ed25519,allow_other,reconnect 0 0 Restart the computer. If you aren’t able to use this as a datastore in Proxmox Backup Server, try this (as per this): Create a local datastore. Copy over its contents to the SSHFS-ed directory. Modify /etc/proxmox-backup/datastore.cfg to point the datastore to the new directory. Resources: ...
Spinning up PBS in the cloud seems fairly easy: Add deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pbs bookworm pbs-no-subscription to the /etc/apt/sources.list file. apt install proxmox-backup-server. (Not proxmox-backup as this requires ZFS etc.) That’s it?
I’ve been interested in setting up a self-hosted email server for quite sometime. I initially tried Mail-in-a-Box, then NixOS Mailserver and I recently moved to mailcow. Some setup notes for my future self: I used a plain Debian instance on Hetzner. Usually, I create a non-root user and disable password-based SSH, but mailcow wants to run everything as root and so I didn’t bother. I disabled Solr and ClamAV so that I can use a lower memory instance. That’s it! It was smooth sailing other than that.
I setup a Restic Rest Server and this is how I can validte snapshots for it: export RESTIC_REST_USERNAME=a export RESTIC_REST_PASSWORD=b export RESTIC_PASSWORD=c export RESTIC_REPOSITORY='rest:https://restic.a.ketanvijayvargiya.com/a' restic snapshots
How do you pick the right bonds? (Assuming my understanding from random internet forums is accurate) One important aspect is: match bond duration with your investment horizon. For e.g., if you want to invest for the long term (say, 20-30 years down the line), then pick bonds that have ultra-long duration. Also, the duration of a bond fund will remain the same even if your investment horizon changes. (If, let’s say, you reach retirement.) In those cases, you may need to modify the proportion of multiple bond funds to get the desired real duration.
I recently worked with an attorney to setup a revocable trust, here in Washington. Some notes from that: What happens when someone dies and leaves their spouse behind? There is portability or unlimited transfer to spouse at the federal level, i.e. the estate tax limit of the latter automatically doubles. You need a credit shelter trust to achieve the same in Washington. 3 roles in a trust: keep in mind that while you are alive, you are the Grantor, Trustee, and Beneficiary of the Trust. As such, whenever it is talking about any of those roles, it pertains to you. Anything you could do with your assets before you put them into the Trust, you can still do while in the Trust. The restrictions only apply once you are incapacitated or have passed away, and a new person is acting only in the role as Trustee (not Grantor or beneficiary). ...
Event: Community Over Code. Venue: Grand Hyatt Denver, Denver, Colorado. See slides here Abstract: Managing Machine Learning environments is hard: “Where do I install package X from? If I install Y, will it break my current environment or change the package closure in any way? How do I share my code and the corresponding environment with a colleague in a reproducible way? If my code runs locally, how do I ensure it runs as-is in the cloud? How do I safely and easily upgrade the environment at a cadence I want?” ...
I was preparing a technical talk but later discarded it because I decided it wouldn’t have enough depth. Following are my notes from that. Title: Over-engineer your blog with Nix flakes, IaC (i.e. infrastructure as code) and CI/CD Description: Imagine you have a simple system that works with a handful of CLI commands and a few clicks on a cloud provider’s console. What happens if you tinker a little too much? Well, you could transform it into a declaratively defined and fully reproducible system that employs CI/CD. ...