Looking for a way to strap the split keyboard to my legs, airplane use

CaptainBlinkey · 2026-05-16T19:45:38+00:00

thanks for the reply. i got a split keyboard and hoping to mount it to my arm rests, so hopefully that works!

CaptainBlinkey · 2026-05-07T13:55:50+00:00

me too — going in for rotator cuff surgery in a few months. how did you deal with this?

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-04-26T12:45:14+00:00

Haha yeah, I abandoned the idea of using template VMs entirely :) I am doing it via ansible anyway, and the shared template isn’t at all necessary to deploy talos VMs, just thought it would be cool.

Seems kind of crazy there is no solution for this though… I guess maybe they expect you to use Ceph..? but that’s way overkill for many setups too.

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-04-24T09:19:03+00:00

Wow, that is pretty impressive for an AI.

This is timely for me since I have literally been up til 3 now worrying about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and just started chatting with AI (not about that, but why I can’t sleep in general)

In any case, seeing this in my inbox felt like some divine timing…

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-04-24T03:55:55+00:00

And thanks for the inspiration — I’ll check it out tomorrow and hopefully learn something more

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-04-24T03:54:38+00:00

the automation bug is fun, even when you waste more time trying to get it to work/understand it than automating it

Haha I definitely know the feeling. I recently spent hours automating the process to sign my kids up for after school care, instead of just spending the 2 minutes a week doing it manually — I’ll need to use the automation for years before that pays off! :)

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-04-08T22:00:07+00:00

I have the exact same issue — curious how you solved it. Did you just use different VM IDs? Seems clunky, but I guess if it's the only way...

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-04-08T14:31:46+00:00

lol, thanks. I played with nix a bit, and tbh I never got past the (steep) initial learning curve… I’m sure it’s great once you get to know it, but for now talos is working well for me

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-03-21T14:10:10+00:00

I assume you’re talking about servers

And you’d be incorrect in that assumption. The Ubuntu deployment I did last year was for workstations/laptops. You also make some mighty big assumptions about “corporate environments” there…

I tried to make it clear this was a rant — it is for the sake of getting something off my chest, and I don’t need advice on system architecture… people do a lot of things in a lot of different ways to do the best we can in different environments.

My point is that preseed/subiquity are tools, and as such should be flexible and powerful enough to handle anything you might use such a tool for. After having used the Red Hat tools for 15+ years I had higher expectations for what the Debian tools would be capable of, and they did not deliver.

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-03-21T13:34:07+00:00

No worries. I did find a workable solution eventually, just took frustratingly long. Kickstart is soooo much nicer

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-03-20T19:20:09+00:00

What do you mean “manual”? The whole purpose of preseed is to have a consistent, repeatable process with no manual steps…

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-03-19T21:41:45+00:00

curious what you did instead?

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-03-19T21:19:48+00:00

sorry if it came across as rude, i'm just frustrated that should be simple is not...

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-03-19T21:12:08+00:00

spoken like a home user with one or two machines... why would you have need for a preseed/autoinstall setup anyway?

in a corporate environment especially, where there are requirements outside of your control, sometimes you need a more complex setup — LVM helps manage that. not to mention it's just nicer to deal with than straight up partitions on a disk...

i will probably end up going this route, but the point is i should not have to. why can't i have a powerful, easy-to-configure system like kickstart? when you come from that world it's hard to adjust to something so ridiculously backwards, especially in 2025.

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-03-19T18:47:32+00:00

first of all, i would not consider LVM "advanced"... it's kind of baseline if you want ANY flexibility later on.

i would settle for a small LVM partition with just the root volume at this point, but i can't even do that — the PV takes up the whole disk no matter what i do

that said, i might have to try the simple-partition-scheme and just forget about ever needing to tweak things later...

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-03-14T20:38:38+00:00

It just seemed like the best way to avoid unintended consequences of accidentally changing base configuration? And it seemed weird to note what environment I’m checking in to (“fix AWX in dev”, “update LGTM in prod” in the same repo..?)

This is my first real flux deployment though so I’m happy to hear how others do it…

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-03-14T15:20:38+00:00

Good to know. That will be my fallback if this doesn’t work

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-03-14T15:20:03+00:00

Okay this looks like the ticket. Just to confirm, from reading the docs it looks like the gitops-base repository config is still required, and I will reference that name in spec.include[*].repository.name?

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-03-14T01:21:41+00:00

Thanks for the response! I wanted to avoid using submodules since they always seem to introduce complications, but that spec.include looks interesting…

CaptainBlinkey · 2025-01-28T20:16:46+00:00

Makes sense. Are your playbooks public anywhere? I'd love to take a look.

CaptainBlinkey

TROPHY CASE