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Hacking on Practicalli content

I am enjoying my 2 week at home vacation (stay-cation) and have already completely rewired my desk, laptops, Monitors and NAS storage devices on the electronic standing desk. It feels a lot more organised and easier to find everything as everything has its place.

Now I can focus on getting lots of Practicalli content done (as well as catch up with shows on Paramount+ and maybe a little Polybus on the Playstation4 VR headset)

I am interested in switching to the Hyprland, although its changing fast so I dug out an older laptop and installed Arch Linux with Hyprland using the archinstall tool. Unfortunately the laptop I used doesnt seem to support Hyprland or something is missing from the install.

I am taking a stay-cation as I am still recovering from Covid and the weather is also quite grim. I am getting out for walks each day and on Friday I completed a short cycle ride as it was nice and sunny outside. Unfortunately my chest started feeling like it was on fire a few minutes into the ride, so I slowed down and limited myself to 10km.

I was feeling really sleepy after the ride, so I kept myself awake by sorting through the cardboard boxes in my attic. Many boxes made the ultimate sacrifice (for an uncluttered house) and went to the recycling service.

Practicalli content planning

Hyprland promises to be a great experience but also a potential time drain, so will save most of the investigation and further configuration until the winter break (or if I need a little distraction of the new shiny for motivation).

Taking two weeks off from work and have some time to work on Practicalli content.

Linux Wayland Compositor & Hyprland

A friend recommended Hyprland window manager which is similar to i3 window manager I currently used, but more optomised for the Wayland compositor.

Practicalli currently uses Regolith Desktop, a complete Linux desktop that leverages Gnome and i3 tiling window manager.

Regolith Desktop provides quite a rich experience using the regolith-desktop Debian package. I have not had much success with Regolith when running with Wayland (specifically Sway).

Sway compositor is an implementation of wayland for i3 window manager. Some of my applications do not see to play nice with Sway (e.g. chromium browser scrolling, simplescreenrecorder cannot run on wayland).

OBS did seem to work okay on wayland, given a sufficiently recent version.

A friend recommended Hyprland, a tiling compositor that provides the latest Wayland features and lots of eye candy. Its pretty easy to setup on Debian, although there is much additional setup before it would be comparable to Regolith Desktop.

Neovim Grug plugin is being considered as an alternative to the Spectre tool for search and replacing across a project.

MegaLinter Grafana Dashboards

As Practicalli projects are being updated to Megalinter version 8 it seemed a good time to try the Megalinter API reporter to publish data to use with Grafana. A chance to learn more about creating Dashboards and if Grafana is any easier than DataDog.

Megalinter not publishing logs on Grafana yet

Unfortunately I havent been able to make the Megalinter API Reporter work with this journal project, Clojure CLI Config or a new megalinter-test project I created.

Health is a little better after resting over the weekend, although still have lots of symptoms.

Megalinter Grafana dashboard example project

Practicalli Megalinter-Test

NOTE: I am trying to diagnose why this project does not seem to be sending logs to Grafana.

Megalinter 8 and monthly version updates

Megalinter updates to version 8 using the megalinter runner tool, adding a Makefile task to simplify the command line (so I dont have to remember the command).

Material for MkDocs provides a nice diff view using the diff language for a code block. Add or copy a diff into the code block, ensuring the - and + signs are included and the diff is automatically highlighted. See the Megalinter section of this post for an example.

Feeling quite low the last few weeks, mostly due to continued Covid symptoms, low blood oxygen and lack of energy. Waking up I feel like I have experienced carbon dioxide poisoning (which I have experienced working on a mushroom farm). I am disorientated, dizzy and feel quite terrible.

Clojure 1.12 and Learn Clojure book

Work on Practicalli Learn Clojure book, a practical guide to getting comfortable working with Clojure. A full guide to using Clojure is in the Practicalli Clojure book.

Added RSS feed for Journal, although I feel that all these blogs should be merged into the https://practical.li/blog site for a single collection or articles. The articles can be categorised to keep them separate.

Health is still recovering from a little Covid symptoms. Took Monday off work and slept most of the day.

Tetris and the fall of the USSR (and Neovim Conjure menu)

Enjoyed watching the Tetris movie and wondered just how much was real and dramatised. Reading the background to the game it does seem the main thread of the movie is accurate, with perhaps some additional dramatic effect. It was a very enjoyable movie regardless.

I do remember the break-up of the USSR when it happened, first with Gorbachev as leader and then Boris Yeltsin. Then the Oligarchs (super rich) moved in and supported a more draconian leader in Putin (assumingly so they could keep hold of all their money).

I also remember Robert Maxwell as a disgraced billionaire that stole from his own company and mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht.

HTTP Message Signing investigation

API Security is typically managed by issuing a token for authentication. Only requests that include a valid token are processed, any requests with an expired or missing token are rejected. HTTP code 401 Unauthorised error message is returned for rejected requests.

When dealing with very sensitive data and higher risk actions common in financial services, additional security mechanisms are required. So I have been looking at mTLS and HTTP Message Signatures (RFC9421) this week.

Not going to be a productive week as I am full of flu. Given the time of year its most likely a variant of Covid. So far I've only had a headache, congested chest / nose / ears and some fatigue. Taking lots of paracetamol and drinking lots of water to try keep the inflammation at bay.

Edit: I was mostly okay by the weekend, although still had a sore throat and coughing.