Certainly, no contributors get into projects with the sole purpose to get a financial gain out of them. Open source has never been about money either. But for you as an author, the lack of funds to sustain your ideas and pay for even a small portion of the time you’re spending on them is—I’m not going to lie—devastating. It may not be your concern at first but it will inevitably become one when your ideas gain popularity, demanding significantly more time than there are hours in a day.

A few weeks ago I ran nix flake update to get the latest versions of CLI tools that I regularly use from nixos-unstable.

atuin is one of those tools which I started using relatively recently and quickly became a huge fan of.

I run it on all of my machines, and I can’t overstate how amazing it is to have all of my shell history across all of my machines synced. I also self-host the atuin server, because why not?

In the previous article we walked through how to set up our very own Nix binary cache.

It’s great being able to run attic push system /run/current-system on whichever machine we are currently using, but the the chances are that if you use Nix to manage your system configurations, you have a system configuration monorepo, and depending on how many machines and architectures you are targeting, it can quickly become tiresome to manually push to the cache from each of them.

I have tried running the Attic Nix Binary Cache on my Hetzner dedicated server in Germany a few times in the past, but the peering issues and the latency to Xfinity in Seattle have always made me throw my hands up in frustration.

This morning I noticed a comment by Zhaofeng on the repo issue tracker.

As a NixOS aficionado myself, I begrudgingly admit that I’ve been running my instance on fly.io 😛

For the most part I feel very much at home on the Hachyderm Mastodon server; it’s probably the best social media experience that I can remember having and I have had the pleasure of interacting with so many cool and impassioned people there.

Hachyderm implements the default 500 character post limit which is hard-coded into the Mastodon codebase and as of writing these, seems unlikely to ever be made configurable.

Every now and then, especially when adding summaries to long (1hr+) live programming videos that I share across the Fediverse, I come up against that limit.

The Layoff

Along with 25% of my former colleagues, I was laid off by Beamery (glassdoor reviews) immediately before “American Thanksgiving”.

I was provided with a number of informational pamphlets at the end of a 5-minute layoff call at 9am which was scheduled with less than 15 minutes of notice.

The following Wednesday, I was at the neighborhood social dance, trying to take my mind off the stress of job hunting in Q4 and interview preparation with some live music.

Before this week, it had been a long time since I visited the Plex subreddit.

I shared my last article there, which was a technical write-up of moving my Plex instance from a Hetzner auction server to a virtual machine running on hardware in my home network, and the considerations that influenced the migration.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that a culture of hostility towards even the mention of Hetzner or other cloud hosting providers has strongly taken root since Plex announced it’s blanket network ban on IP ranges associated with Hetzner data centers.

Last October, Plex started blocking access to instances running on servers hosted by Hetzner.

I have a Hetzner Auction server that I renew every year or so to make use of newer hardware, which I use to run various workloads, from web services, to scheduled jobs and self-hosted instances of privacy-friendly alternative web frontends like Nitter.

Another one of those workloads, until recently, was Plex.

I didn’t have the time to put too much effort into getting around the Hetzner network ban when it was first implemented, so I just started running Jellyfin instead. I even made a video demonstrating how easy it was to get Jellyfin up and running on a VPS.

I came across an interesting thread on the NixOS subreddit today that helped me fix a problem that I didn’t even know I had with my NixOS system configuration.

Every now and then, I’ll try to quickly do nix-shell -p somepackage, and it will fail, because somepackage couldn’t be found.

I go and check https://search.nixos.org and it’s there. Huh. Weird.

So I just go and add it to my environment.systemPackages to install it, and remove it if it turns out I don’t really need it.

I have a confession to make. Until yesterday, I did not have any form of dotfiles management or versioning for my Windows 11 machine. Yes, I, the person who wrote an entire tiling window manager for Windows from scratch in Rust, did not manage my dots.

I had to sheepishly admit this on more than one occasion in the project Discord server when people would watch my live programming videos and then ask if I could share my Windows dotfiles repo.