Work in progress text. You’re welcome to read the current draft, but it’s not complete..

Introduction

Hello world, is anyone reading this? I’d figured giving a shot at a personal blog, it could be a fun thing to do. Build a personal brand, find a place to collect my knowledge and act as a CV for the future.

In a year as of writing this I’ll (hopefully) be done with my masters and searching for a job. Who knows, you reading this at the moment might have received this page in my job application. If that’s the case: Hi please hire me.

My next semester will be one filled with a lot of writing and reading. Two things which I’m decent at but could always be better. I hope that this site will help me in this endeavour. I wont be writing any great pieces anytime soon, but it will be good practice for a master thesis.

What to write?

So the question is, what will I be writing about? The answer is that I do not know at the moment. I’ll probably make a post in the future about my current interest in thermal printers. If anyone happens to read this and is interested in a rust library for ESC/POS look here. I’ve made it to work with my printer which is accessed over LAN. This means that there’s no support for USB or serial connections at the moment, but who wants that anyway :)?

Anyways my other interest is minor tinkering with my computer. I’m not in it as deep as the likes of r/unixporn. However a nice background and a good tiling window manager is always nice, combined with some minor helper scripts.

I recently got blessed by the benefits of Nixos. A Linux distro which is to me a good combination of tinkering and stability. I wouldn’t recommend it to a normal user as it has some quirks. The usual package manager is replaced by configuration files which are then built. I got into it after working with Yocto as part of my bachelor thesis. There’s something really attractive about having a file where everything is defined. Want to add something to your system? Simply edit the file, rebuild and you’re done. Want to remove something? Remove it from the file, rebuild and you’re done.

I in good tinkering fashion used to run Arch but after a while lost track of all the installed packages. It would of probably been possible to track it all, remove configuration files etc. But that takes time and is already solved with Nix. Another benefit is that I can sync everything through git. Every machine I have is configured the same way, they have the same packages and configurations. Here’s that for anyone interested. It’s a fairly normal configuration, if you know about nix then it’s nothing special in there. If you haven’t seen it before then it might be interesting to have a look.