bengalister

It's a standalone multi-asset portfolio tracker for securities and currencies, using PostgreSQL for data storage and Grafana dashboards for visualization across asset classes, sectors, and regions. Public market pricing is periodically pulled from public financial web sources, and helper scripts allow ingesting manually exported position files. It does not connect to bank or financial institution accounts, nor does it provide investment advice or recommendations.

I use it only as id (idp) broker and SSO to authenticate to my apps. I don't have a use case that requires sharing identity across applications. It is definitely overkill for now, I could have used a password manager and a browser extension.

So far it is ok. I even have a usb zigbee dongle receiver in usb passthrough and the container in privileged mode. I am moving to the Apple ecosystem and I managed to have homekit bridge connected to Apple home. I had to use an avahi relay on the NixOS host for the discovery protocol to work. The home assistant is not the same network as my devices. The homekit bridge allows to configure the advertised IP.

I use tailscale (outside the k8s cluster) for connectivity. My phone companion app is not connected to my home assistant server outside my home but could through tailscale.

So definitely there is added complexity, especially on the iptables configuration. Without the AI help, I don’t think I would have managed to do it regardless of the time saving.

Yes i will probably end up using systemd services when I will hit resource limits. So far everything works just fine on my LG16 32 GB i7 laptop and consumes around 15w.

I also self host some services: keycloak, forgejo, home assistant, immich, grafana/prometheus, jellyfin, pureftp (to store my surveillance cameras videos), and a vibecoded financial app, and soon hermes agent on a 2023 laptop.

I chose to run most of them on Kubernetes since I am used to work with it. I use:

- ha-proxy running on the host and istio running inside the cluster for the sni based ingress routing - cert-manager with a self-signed CA I had to import the CA cert on my devices - cloudnative pg for postgresql dbs (keycloak and immich)

For the backup it is mainly some cron jobs that save to the cloud.

It is overkill I admit but kubernetes makes some integrations easier. Even though it was also a way for me to maintain some Kubernetes skills for my work. The tricky part is the network connectivity, for instance home assistant runs inside the cluster on its own network and it makes things more complex like homekit bridge integration (different network than my devices). But with the help of AI the iptables configuration makes wonders.

The kubernetes cluster is k3s running on NixOS micro vms, fully managed declaratively thanks to NixOS.

The services that run outside the cluster (ha-proxy, jellyfin) are all managed declaratively.

At some point I had thought of using proxmox with lxc but I am very happy with NixOS.

With NixOS you get the declarative approach.

I remember him from a tech video on theserverside.com, I thinkg it was on guice and dependency injection back in the 2005-2010 period. He was all smiles, energetic and inspiring. Sad news.

True but you see very different landscapes in these 3000kms and probably more diverse than in the 24000km of the Canadian trail.

Also if you like history you probably can visit some castles from different centuries along the way.

But it is true that on the French trail you cannot experience real wilderness where you encounter no humans for days and fear to do a bad encounter with wildlife.

The only wildlife that you'd probably see are ibex/chamois, beavers, vultures/eagles in the mountains, and if you are lucky wild boars, foxes, squirrels, deers, snakes and extremely lucky wolves in the Alps and bears in the Pyrenees.

The trail lacks a segment on the Mediterranean coast.

It could extended by going down to Menton on the Mediterranean from the Ecrins National Park via the Queyras and Mercantour national parks, but it is quite a detour.

The limit to 6 months is pretty disappointing. Also the 1,000,000 ISK monthly salary for workers in the Schengen area is pretty restrictive, except for Switzerland, Norway, not that many people earn that level of salary.

I built a web SPA "crypto" calculator that performed basic and generic tasks such as symmetric ciphering with block padding, hashing with different algorithms at the same time, pkcs7 messages ciphering/deciphering, and utilities like base64 to hex to ascii, etc encoding/decoding, etc.

I did at the time Angular was hot and I wanted to learn it. Also because it made my life easier at my job. I developed it fully at home outside office hours (I did not work remotely at that time), published it on github and deployed it on a personal public VM, and I told one or two direct colleagues about it.

A few months later, some people in the company who I did not know started using it (from the public site, not running it locally) and then later even manual validation plans or troubleshooting guides referred to it (its url).

I noticed through the server logs that it was used from many different countries, it was barely active but still got between 2 to 5 visits per day. And from the location I knew that it was very likely people from my company (no zscaler at that time).

One day I wanted to upgrade the VM and also cut down old sites that I maintained. So I shut down the website. A few days later I received a complaint in my company from 2 guys asking me to put it back on. I had to explain them that no way, I would not put it back on, it was a personal project fully developed outside business hour on my personal laptop, hosted on a personal VM that I paid for, etc.

This could have got me fired maybe, even though the cryptographic functions were really generic, I could have been accused to have stolen company time or whatever. The company was really not the kind to give 20% of our time to work on personal ideas.

I managed to have the same battery life if not better than on Windows 11.

I own a 3 years old Dell XPS 13, i7 16GB of RAM and run it on the latest Fedora (arch btw before). It is a personal laptop, I mainly use it to browse the web and occasionally work on personal projects (Python,Typescript,Rust), mostly on neovim, vscode otherwise.

For power management, I use TLP instead and also disabled power-profiles-daemon (I don´t know autocpufreq).

The key point especially for my usage was to enable as much as possible video hardware acceleration for every app especially the browser (firefox for me). Archwiki is your friend for that. Also for intel graphics you should make sure that the graphics micro controller is used (Guc) for media decoding. It is also well explained on the intel graphics Archwiki page (guc/huc firemare loading).

Truly agree.

There are also countries like France which only imported cheap and poor labor. France never tried or even discouraged rich people to settle in the country with punitive taxes (compared to our neighbors and other western world countries). For instance London has (or had) rich Russians/Indians/Pakistani investors who made London their residence, not the case for Paris, foreign real estate owners don't take French permanent residency.

And nowadays, we are left with some politicians who promote economic immigration even when there is no need or deny any form of control on illegal immigration mostly to import voters.

I used to manage my dotfiles with stow (xstow actually) and do some simple links. Now I run an Ansible playbook that creates links or copy depending on the files and also install tools on different OSes.

The big benefit is that it can be organized in a modular way with roles and tags, and sensitives files (like my gpg keys...) can be encrypted with the vault.