rbn.im

Oh, hi! I'm Ruben Schuller and here are some notes about things, mostly tech-related. At the top you can find a link to my various computer things as fossil repositories.

If you want to write me you can use mail ate rbn.im for emails or ate rbn colon orgizm.net using matrix. i'm less frequently online on XMPP as rbn ate member.fsf.org.

removing politics from xsnow

11 December 2023

i'm quite unhappy that hacking has become an ever serious, politicized, endeavour. co-opted by many movements for their purposes which have nothing to do with hacking, software freedom or freedom. things just seemed more fun in the past. maybe it's just nostalgia for more simple, dare i say sane, times.

hidden keys on x260

19 November 2023

by chance - meaning by looking up how to invoke magic sysrq fn + s, figuring that i should try other keys combined with fn

if you followed the steps of my previous post things won't work anymore if you are on -current.

as i've moved my code to fossil, i stumbled across some slight naming issues

now from fossil

12 April 2023

drew devault decided to cancel richard stallman, my repositories now living on as self hosted fossil and how this isn't paradox given the licenses involved

my media CIFS/SMB mount lagged in GUI file browsers while scolling large directories. a mount option fixes this.

in the last post i wrote that you need to use ATAPI as transport. turns out you don't!

writing bluray discs

28 February 2023

short notes about writing bluray discs on the commandline because i always forget something about how to do it :)

turns out just adding a inhibit script so that shutdown always is aborted doesnt help. we need to recompile elogind!

why does every single language have to reinvent the make wheel? now even the go world has fallen to this plague, someone felt that there should be magefiles.

how to stop elogind on slackware from doing things like automagick shutdowns or suspend.

how to enable pipewire on slackware 15.0 if you aren't using a full blown desktop environment.

it gets increasingly hard to compile stuff offline, most languages use some kind of own package management, and few get it right. this is a compilation of hacks useful to build stuff offline.

GUIs with TCL, Tk and TclOO

15 January 2022

notes about some more obscure things when building GUIs with TCL/Tk using TclOO.

this explains in short terms how to setup a yadifa DNS server which is backed up by Hurricane Electrics free DNS service.

short notes on how to install a lean stack of althttpd, stunnel and dehydrated on slackware-15 (currently -current).

open SQLite databases can't just be copied to back them up. while you can use the sqlite3 shell .backup builtin for this, it may be preferrable to do it from inside your Go program.

slackware extlinux installation

how to install extlinux as bootloader for BIOS based systems, with GPT partitions. this assumes slackware,

tlog static site generator

04 December 2020

for some time now this blog was generated using hugo. not anymore! i've built my own generator, tlog. in tcl.

rrsync Setup Notes

25 February 2019

rrsync is a wrapper script which limits the access of rsync to a sub-hierarchy of the filesystem. this is useful for automated tasks like backups or deploying things. i bet there are plenty other write-ups on this, so i have to add mine.

Rarely Used Go Constructs

09 September 2018

There are some constructs in Go which are not commonly used. The first can be used a bit like pattern matching, the second is function values of type methods.

xscreensaver takes a little duration when resuming to lock the screen. to fix this, the screen has to be locked before pm-suspend is called.

matrix is another take on federated messaging, supporting fancy features. this roughly shows how to setup a homeserver with matrix synapse and serve the riot web ui for matrix.

syslinux on usb key

11 November 2017

steps to install syslinux to an usb key. shown here is how to boot memtest.

upspin suffix setup

23 September 2017

basic setup for servers and clients is described at upspin.io/doc/. to use suffixes (normal and +snapshot), a bit more setup is required on the client side.

iwlwifi

15 June 2017

i recently noticed that my wifi was really slow. checking it revealed that i only had 1Mbit as bitrate, while the link quality was fine.

i use thinkpads and really like the trackpoint. i also like middle clicking. this leaves one in a state where no sane scolling is possible, hold-middle-scrolling-trackpoint just seems wrong. so heres how to use the wretched trackpad for scrolling, disabling it as mouse.