technical

88 posts

technical

Codex is changing how I think about computers

There is no doubt we're living through a seismic change in how we interface with computers. I have spent the last 15+ years learning a craft, how to adminster and interface with Linux. But I'm starting to feel a shift in my own behaviours, which fills me with awe and simultaneously makes me deeply uncomfortable. I wanted to take a moment to share a slice of that journey with you today. Tea. Earl Grey. Hot. Picture this. Sitting on the couch with my 5yo daughter watching a new favourite show o

self-hosted

Self-Hosted 150. Fin.

Almost 6 years. 150 episodes. 34 guests. 1 Chris. 1 Badger. 1 podcast comes to an end. I thought it fitting to write this post, about the Self-Hosted podcast drawing to a conclusion, on the very self-hosted blog that began my self-hosting journey way back in August 2013. (blog.ktz.me turned into Linuxserver.io before being recreated as blog.ktz.me again at some point). Episode 150 airs on Friday May 30th, 2025 (I will update and replace this with an embed once the episode is out). And since w

linux

How to enable Intel Quicksync on NixOS with a Supermicro X13SAE-F and an Intel i5-13600k

Like most things, getting Quicksync working on NixOS with a motherboard that has IPMI and a 13th gen Intel chip is quite simple once you know how. The complexities come from ensuring users are in the right groups, and you have the correct arrangement of packages in the hardware.opengl configuration. nix-config/hosts/nixos/morphnix/default.nix at main · ironicbadger/nix-configContribute to ironicbadger/nix-config development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHubironicbadger I'll include a mi

technical

Set a static IP in Unraid from the command line

When flashing the brand new Unraid 7 to a USB stick earlier today I did something silly. I configured a static IP that conflicted with another host in the same LAN. This meant I couldn't access the Unraid UI to fix it. However, by modifying one file in the /boot directory by hand we can set a static IP easily and quickly. In Unraid land, the /boot directory is persisted on the USB stick the system boots from. To make changes to this file, open the command line interface to your Unraid system e

ansible

git submodules for fun and profit with Ansible

No matter how hard I try to fully switch over to Nix, I always seem to end up back at the altar of Ansible. This post isn't about Nix so I won't go into some of my frustrations there (yet!). This post is about my newly rekindled relationship with the old, trusty, git submodule. Git submodules effectively allow you to embed one repo inside another whilst retaining complete independence of the embedded repo. For example, it is common in Ansible to import roles from external sources. Simply add th

technical

Everyone should have a PiKVM in their desk area

What do you do when you want to tinker with a bare metal system? For years, I'd go drag an old monitor, keyboard, and mouse out of a cupboard. Then, I'd inevitably spend 20 minutes looking for an ethernet cable that was the right length before finding that I had the wrong power cable. A few weeks ago I had an epiphany. The kind that once you have it, is so stinkin' obvious you wonder what on earth you were thinking all this time by not seeing it! Put a PiKVM in your desk area! In the picture

technical

Reading obfuscated Seagate SMART stats with smartctl

Reading a SMART report from a Seagate drive with smartctl can be bit tricky sometimes. Values that should be human readable are obfuscated. This can lead to issues in all sorts of tools, but what we really want is just a simple number. Thankfully, we can decode the output using the following command: smartctl /dev/sdX -a -v 1,raw48:54 -v 7,raw48:54 -v 241,raw48:54 -v 242,raw48:54 The command takes the input of -v ID#,raw48:54 so if you wanted to read Raw_Read_Error_Rate as a human, you'd ente

technical

Set a static IP address in Home Assistant OS

Full credit goes to this forum post. I found myself in need of dropping to the CLI for a fresh Home Assistant OS install on top of Proxmox after using the tteck helper scripts to set a static IP. To do this without access to the Home Assistant UI we must drop to the command line of HAOS itself. Simply typing login will drop you out of the HAOS CLI and you will be able to use nmcli to set these parameters on the underlying OS. nmcli nmcli is a command line tool to modify network configuratio

linux

Fixing "kernel EDID has corrupt header" in Proxmox 8 and NixOS

Since fairly recently my Proxmox install has shown an almost barf inducing amount of errors along the lines of edid block 0 is all zeroes or kernel EDID has corrupt header. The issue is present on at least Promox 8.1.5 running kernel Linux 6.5.13-3-pve. Thanks for the fix goes to a couple of threads here and here. Some folks suggested disabling AST graphics, or blacklisting the i915 driver - this had no effect on my ASRock Rack E3C246D4U motherboard with i5 8500 CPU. This is a vanilla install