Goodbye Twitter

There has been a lot written already about how Elon Musk bid to buy Twitter, tried to back out, then was forced to go through with the purchase, and even more written about what happened next.
The Verge has a pretty good timeline of events.

Back in November lots of people started looking elsewhere, and I was no exception. I saw someone I followed create an account on the Hachyderm Mastodon server and decided to do the same.

Giving Up Maintainership

I’ve previously posted that I maintained the FreeBSD Port of hugo (www/gohugo), the awesome static site generator written in Go. I heard about it on one of the Jupiter Broadcasting podcasts in mid-2016 (I don’t remember which one, specifically) and by July 2016 I submitted my first request for a Port to be added to the tree.

By September of the same year this website had been converted from Wordpress to Hugo. Looking at Git, it looks like I started converting the site in August 2016.

The Infinite Escape Room

Back in 2018 I was at the Frocester Beer Festival with some friends, it had become an annual tradition to go to this festival for a weekend of sampling beers, and catching up - sometimes for the first time since the last beer festival.
It was in 2018 that I sat down with my friend Mike Collins talked about podcasts and podcasting. We both wanted to get into it, I was thinking a tech news/help related podcasts but Mike had some other ideas.

Railway Boundary Markers

Back in June this year we bought our first house! The process was stressful, and not something I want to go through again ant time soon!

Our house is located in the town of Risca, well to be more precise it’s actually in Pontymister.

I had noticed a slightly odd metal thing poking out of the ground near our garage:

Back in the office

Back on the 13th March 2020 work told us:

…if the impact on your work is low and manageable, you should work from home.

Although the office was open to those that needed to go in, we were being encourage to work from home. This image was taken for one of our Town hall meetings celebrating how well we’d all transitioned in the early days - and I note that it’s been used in a few since too!

Hosting vaultwarden on FreeBSD

Background

Almost two years ago I stopped managing my passwords with the excellent 1Password and switched to Bitwarden.

Manjaro ZFS Setup

At the end of my last post I noted that I’d switched from an Ubuntu flavoured distro to Manjaro Linux. I’ve been rocking it for over a month now, first on an 2013 Dell Optiplex 9090 but it just got an upgrade!

Migrating my desktop to Linux

Note: This post contains partially formed opinions and may sound like it’s being overly negative. This is a first impressions post by someone who rarely writes, let alone about first impressions. I like what I’ve done, I’m happy with Linux and will stick with it.

Back in 2011 I bought a 27" iMac and it has long served me well. I bought the best that I could afford at the time which I think is one of the reasons it has lasted me so long.

Setting up mfsBSD for receiving ZFS snapshots on systems with low memory

I recently had a need to boot into a fresh server (a VirtualBox VM, actually) with FreeBSD in order to partition the disk and make it ready to restore another machine onto it.

Restore FreeBSD from a ZFS Snapshot

This was a beautiful sight this morning. The image below is a VirtualBox console showing a booted FreeBSD system. That system has been restored from a ZFS snapshot taken last November. So, how did we do it?