Flags.gg Launched

On 2024-12-24 I soft launched (soft because not all features are finished yet, but enough to get it launched) the service

The service is works with the majority of features in place

Live Features

• Multi Project

  If you have a plan that supports multiple projects, then the support exists that flags don’t clash with each other

• Multi Agent

  You might need multi agents, e.g. a dashboard and a landing page (like flags.gg)

Cluster Update

My kubernetes cluster runs on a mix of RaspberryPI 4s, and x86(AMD64) machines, but because I built it originally with only the raspberrys, my control plane was on a PI

Well that was working fine for nearly 2 years, but the SD card on the control plane died, which wasn’t a good time

So I decided to what I always do, and go nuts

Spending spree

So I purchased a few things to tackle this issue

Old iPads with a Modern Use

I have gone quite heavy into home automation, not too extreme (mainly because I don’t have a lot of automated products) but enough that it has made an impact on my life, I have the following automations

• Automatic lights in a few rooms
  • Kitchen: the light comes on when you enter the room, and only turns off after it has been vacant for 5 minutes (if your stood at the stove and haven’t moved much I don’t want the light to go off)
  • Dining Room: light comes on when you go past a sensor in the hall/stairs (there isn’t a sensor in the dining room)
  • Living Room: light comes on when you enter the room, and goes off if there is no activity for 5 minutes and the TV isn’t on (sat at the sofa watching something shouldn’t turn the lights off)
  • Stairs: Turn on when you enter the stairs either from the top or the bottom, turn off after 1 minute of no activity
  • Bedroom: Turn on in the morning, turn off when everyone “should” have left the bedroom

Future plans

There are plans for future automations, every room has a temperature sensor in it, and will have wall heaters (I live in the UK) that turn on when the sensor detects the temperature not the heater detecting the temperature, this is to avoid it thinking “I’m nice and warm and 10ft from the nearest person screw them”

Inverse Images in Mailspring

So I run most apps in darkmode, and this can lead to a few issues, namely in Mailspring which does darkmode in the “easy” method, which is to inverse(100%) everything now this makes general emails really easy, the problem is when you get to images, because inversed images are horrible to look at

So I got bored over new year, and decided I was sick of looking at them, and because I use Dracula for everything, I set off on my journey

Well that was annoying

So I run arch on my framework, and because I’m slightly an idiot I didn’t have linux/linux-headers in the do not upgrade filter, now thats a lesson I won’t forget soon

I did the standard upgrade, which brought with it the latest (5.9.12) kernel with it, wish I remembered it did that, because when I rebooted, my display no longer worked, and once it got to sway, and didn’t initiate the eGPU, my FPS on sway was about 0.000005 so impossible to do anything

Premise

So I decided to switch my home directory to use systemd-homed, now this is a cool system that works with btrfs and does snapshoting built in, this led to a few issues though

Issue

So because of the way containerd and buildkit use squashfs it can’t submount inside the homed directory

Fix

If you have multiple hdds then this is easier, if not your gonna have to create a directory on your system, doing it where I did it is not a good idea, but I’m not an expert

ArchLinux NerdCTL

Arch is a lot like Slackware and Gentoo, whilst it does have a package manager, you have to know what you want before things work

so NerdCTL has the ability to use buildkit to install stuff on multi-arch but that isn’t as easy as you would like and as such there are a few things that need installing to make it work

Steps

This will need YAY (well there are others but if you copy paste then its yay)

Framework Laptop

My MBP decided the touchbar and bridgeos was going to basiclly blow up, so because of this I decided it was time I tried to daily drive linux again

I bought a framework laptop with the following specs

• i7-1165G7
• 64Gb DDR4-3200
• 1TB SN850
• US Keyboard
• UK PowerSupply
• Expansions
• • MicroSD
  • 250Gb
  • DisplayPort
  • 2x USB-C
  • USB-A

I decided to get the UK powersupply so that my wife could keep using my MBPs for her work laptop and it means that I have a pretty small power supply that can also be used with my soldering iron

Mistakes were made

Well I’ve had a fun weekend, on one side I “finally” caught covid and as such my concentration levels were very low, now that doesn’t make up for what I did but at least I have 1/2 an out

What happened

I decided to do a little cleaning up of my kubernetes cluster, and decided that I should remove some deployments that weren’t in use, that was going fine, but then I decided to try and move some of the things that were more “central” to their correct namespace,
correct is a probably the wrong word, since I do kind of follow the principle of a namespace for a service rather than a namespace for a project (e.g. all of chewedfeed's stuff goes in the chewedfeed one, some things should be seperate if they are used by multiple things)

Retro Board Update

Well after a couple of months of coding ive got about 50% through doing reto-board, major progress has been made, it is now techniclly possible to sign up for it,

you can’t yet make any boards, but there an example version of what a board will look like non of the functionality works in the example

it took quite a while for me to get the login to work, and the main reason to that is undocumented bits that I had to get working myself, for example “can I do this / userAllowed” is not a standard feature it seems at least not in the golang libraries for keycloak, so I had to go down a very long and winding path