Used to use FreshRSS. Switched to miniflux and I’m much happier now. It’s very, very simple, very clean, and does exactly what it says on the tin. You may, however, want the less opinionated experience of FreshRSS. You can always try both. (PS. I don’t typically use miniflux as my actual reader – I use reader software for that most of the time, with all my devices pulling from the same miniflux-based RSS source.)

Like many, it hasn’t been a clean “yesterday windows, today linux” thing for me. In 2004, I switched from a Dell Latitude (Windows) to a Mac, but continued to use Windows for work (because it was required), then I switched my most recent Macbook Air to Linux, kept another Mac around running macos, and still use Windows at work (because it’s a requirement). I expect I’m going to be Linux-first from now on (so macos’s days are numbered around here), but still use Windows at work.

I’m kinda bummed about moving on from macos, but the iOSification is just awful. The OS feels confused and bloated now. I honestly think Apple is due for a pretty serious reset and consolidation of operating systems.

That does, indeed, help. And I got to the 3rd page of google/kagi results without seeing any hint of it. Thank you so much.

I think about it like this:

Layer 2b: ->> User applications (flatpak, nixpkgs, etc.)

Layer 2a: ->> User data (mutable, persistent no matter what your system layer is)

Layer 1: -> System (immutable/read-only/updated "atomically" meaning all at once) 

Layer 0: Hardware

Or, alternately, it’s what macos has been doing with absolutely no fanfare for several versions now. That’s not a knock, btw. It’s an illustration that it can be completely transparent in use, though it may require some habit changes on linux.

Out of the box, I love Vanilla OS’s color scheme and wallpaper, with Fedora in second place for a default Gnome environment. I like the Pop_OS theme. I use River WM with a gruvbox theme (Vivaldi with no open tabs pictured), which is about as far from out of the box as you can get. Incidentally, I’ve been team light theme forEVER, but I’ve switched with gruvbox.

I believe the Synology tailscale client doesn’t support tailscale SSH, but I was able to “classic SSH” into the NAS (remotely, via Tailscale) with no problem.

Apologies for the delay. July 4th festivities and rescuing a kitten from a storm drain intervened (upside: we now have a kitten).

I can ping the NAS from the client on the Tailscale IP (100.x.x.x) and the tailscale hostname. If I SSH to the NAS, I cannot ping the client machine, but everything on the NAS is available from the client other than the NFS share (and I think I remember reading that the Synology tailscale client does not support ping).

I realize we’re sort of narrowing in on an NFS setting or possibly a firewall setting, and I appreciate your patience in going on this journey with me, but I have configured both according to, most relevantly, the tailscale documentation for connecting to a Synology NAS.

It’s the same error regardless of whether I connect by tailscale IP (100.x.x.x) or the tailscale hostname, and it strongly suggests an issue on the Synology, but everything looks correct on the NAS (but I am by NO MEANS an expert):

mount.nfs: access denied by server while mounting $IP:/volume1/$mount

1. Declaring the NFS mount in my NixOS configuration; also tried manually mounting via

sudo mount -o nfs $TAILSCALEHOSTNAME:/$MOUNT /mnt/$MOUNT (with some options like no auto, but I’m doing this from memory)

2. I’ll try but I have some idea that it won’t respond to ping
3. I will try in a moment
4. yes, on the local network (192.168.x.x) — and for the record I allowed access to the NFS share via the tailscale subnet

The error I am receiving differs depending on whether I’m connecting via CLI or, say, Nautilus but I’ll have to collect the errors when I’m back at the laptop.

Please stay to the end because it’s important, and it’s going to be a horrible bait and switch but it’s not INTENDED that way. I can’t think of another way to present the difficult combination of interests that seem to be driving MS software lately.

I actually quite like Windows 11, and I love Edge when they’re doing their core functions. Windows 11 is reasonably solid and useful for normal use. Edge is faster than Chrome and has the best vertical tabs implementation on the planet. Much of the baseline software that Microsoft is putting out has never been better, and is often really good at doing the basic things software should do. I really do feel like the genuine technology people in Microsoft are trying, and often succeeding, to make good technology products.

But… the bottom-feeder marketing drones and MBAs got their hands on them and started layering creepier and creepier nonsense over the top. Mandatory logins to glorified data collection engines. Monetization strategies masquerading as features. Overt advertisement. Heavy-handed promotion of Microsoft’s own products. I finally stopped using Edge (on Linux!) when I discovered that just looking at the settings the wrong way would re-enable every intrusive setting imaginable and ditched Windows entirely when I saw the same things creeping into the OS (as well as a general disgust with privately-owned OSes in general). They are destroying trust.

In the great irony of my life, because normally work PC Windows installs have been hot garbage, I have Win11 on a work laptop and it’s actually really great to use since all of the intrusive stuff is turned off by our security team. I would still prefer linux or macos (in that order), but as a “forced to use it” option, it’s not bad at all. Go back and read that again: it’s a pleasant and easy to use OS if all the intrusive marketing functionality is turned off because it presents a security hazard.

PS. Not sacrificing anything being predominantly linux-based and am in fact far, far more efficient on linux (and I am not a programmer or in any other technology role).

11 months later …

NixOS looks interesting whoosh sucked into a warp

One of the more annoying things about living in Florida is that we have closely related animals that are nearly identical, but they don’t have glow-butts. (At least not down in the bottom half of the state.)

I’ll wait for someone from like Lakeland to say they have them.

Birds. Servers are big, strong, imposing birds. Mobile devices are small and flitting birds. Things in between are birds in between. I’ve put some thematic value on some of the bird names (a showy bird for media, etc.).

Looks at M2 macbook running NixOS

Ok maybe I do need help.

I never sorted out what the answer was but I’m almost certain it was a gnome issue, possibly a conflict. I did manage to completely hose my system through troubleshooting, but, hey, I just grabbed an earlier version of my nix config, typed one command, and was back up and running in an earlier state. NixOS is weird and troublesome to learn but goodness it’s useful.

I haven’t updated firmware. And because I’m just going to be That Guy this week, I had done a garbage collection cleanup the day before this nonsense started.

Integrated laptop keyboard (so I assume USB under the hood?)

You’re right, but it’s pretty horrendous typing in this environment so it slipped my mind.

Intel® Core™ i7-10610U 16GB Intel® UHD Graphics Gnome/Wayland NixOS 23.11 kernel 6.1.57

Sort of, but the notes aren’t organized in the filesystem. So you point to a location where the files will live and it creates, e.g., journals and pages folders into which journals and pages are dropped. Each is one flat directory (which seems like a scaling problem after a while, but I’m nowhere near that being an issue).

Because logseq doesn’t do freeform markdown by default, you cannot just open any arbitrary markdown file in it. Or, rather, it will give unpredictable results if you do. If you’re used to a free-form editor that organizes files hierarchically, that is going to seem very, very strange and may not be what you’re looking for. My preference is to spend zero time organizing files and organizing text, so logseq’s choice to make both a non-issue is an absolute godsend. Open the app, start typing. It’s great (for me).

Logseq is really, really close. It’s basically a page I can start writing on, forcing minimal organization through bullets but otherwise freeform. Backlinking, plugins (meh), plain markdown. It’s just so good. It doesn’t require me to do anything other than write. It used to be entirely browser-based, syncing through a github repository. They could have released a self-hostable version of that and I would have been over the moon. Or, alternately, a self-hostable version with non-local storage so I could store my notes on a notes server I control. But they went with the app + sync service route. Understandable but sad.

So I just rolled my own sync through a git server and it works fine (other than iOS, which requires a maddening setup, but that’s not logseq’s fault).

I looked at Zettlr once or twice (thank you for mentioning it). Obsidian makes me crazy with all the UI fiddly bits and configuration. I tried. Oh how I tried. But it just didn’t work with my brain. (It’s the exact same reaction I have to KDE – there’s just TOO MUCH and it sets me off in unproductive directions, and that’s not a criticism of either project as such.)