Waybar has no default support for showing Wireguard VPN connections. There are several ways to work around this issue via the waybar-custom (see man waybar-custom). So here is mine. ;-)

At first we create a helper script to more easily leverage the usage of JSON output which is then consumed by Waybar.

Something that always bothered me on DeviantArt was the missing feature to just download a gallery (for example your favourites folder) to your hard drive. Together with the what seems to be a decline of the platform (being sold, questionable moves with so called A.I.) I found it time to part ways with it.

The decision is older but I stayed because I never found the time to store away image collections that I liked. This problem can be solved thanks to gallery-dl. :-)

While ScalaCheck is a powerful library that comes with quite some generators already, you need to write your own for your custom types. However I found it problematic that simply deriving generators for Cats “container” data types from existing ones is not included.

After upgrading some workstations from 14.0 to 14.1 the microphone (audio recording) in Firefox stopped working. This came as a surprise because it worked for years without any issues. So, time to do some debugging! :-)

I even cannot remember why I started using the ssh daemon from ports (openssh-portable) but it might have been some feature I needed at that time.

However, ever since then one of my first things done on a fresh install was disabling the base sshd and replacing it with the one from ports.

Thinking about it recently I realised that this very likely a pretty dumb idea, so I checked if I really still needed the ports version and … surprise … I don’t. ;-)

If you upgrade your FreeBSD installation you should also upgrade your bootloader (bootcode) too. However in many cases you don’t need to, so you might never have done it. ;-) However if you’re booting from a ZFS pool which you upgrade to a newer version than the bootloader can handle then you’re in for trouble.

An example is upgrading directly from FreeBSD 13.2 to 14.0 which resulted in problems for quite some people that forgot to update the bootloader. The regular examples are however always directed at legacy (BIOS) boot scenarios. There is nothing wrong booting via BIOS but you might be in an environment where the system is booted via UEFI.

But how do we find out?

Recently I got inspired to try out the December Adventure and so here we are. ;-)

It has been nearly two years now since I switched from Sylpheed to aerc as my daily driver for email.

While Sylpheed still is an awesome email client my switch was triggered by more heavy usage of a laptop than before and the discovery of usability problems I thought long solved like:

• very high resolution but applications either zoomed / scaled which results in less space than needed
• unwieldy mouse handling (touch pads suck)
• after disabling application zooming fonts and icons were barely readable

The default expectation of the wonderful aerc email client is the usage of abook as address book. Also most people seem to use calcurse for calendars. However what if we want to switch?

Some of us prefer to use console (text terminal) tools for productivity and that is just fine. In this tutorial we’ll explore how to synchronise address books and calendars via the DAV protocols for the khard address book and the khal calendar.

The trouble started when emails were coming in claiming first “Fail” and later “DegradedArray” events of a software raid running on a Debian Linux server. Looking into logs revealed an SSD (NVMe) died but let us look at it step by step.