bestov.io

As part of the datacenter-wide visibility upgrade I’m working on for a customer, I’m setting up monitoring one of their legacy network applications. This application has no logging support whatsoever, and upgrade path available: the original developers have published a new version 10+ years ago, and have no interest for supporting it apart from (sometimes) replying to support tickets. Thus, to set up at least some basic metrics, the solution I came up with is to monitor the COM+ components that work together to make it up...

I’m doing a project, a very simple one: it’s a sous vide cooker. The details don’t matter, as in this article we are going to focus on a single component: the KY-040 rotary encoder. If you are here, you have most likely just bought a KY-040 clone from China, and are looking into how to hook it up to your Arduino. This is a bit of a deviation from the usual highly technical and specific content of this blog, but there’s a good reason for it: I spent 15 minutes googling about this, and all I got was some generic copy-pasted (often clearly stolen) code that mostly - albeit very inefficiently - worked...

It’s been a few years now since I switched to Wayland. I use Sway, a compositor based on wlroots, and apart from the sporadic broken Wayland application (easy fix: force XWayland) and Java application (easy fix: set _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1), it’s mostly been great times. I have also been a long time user of UK International Keyboard, and that is the layout I know by heart and use on all physical keyboards. This layout builds upon the standard UK keyboard to enable you to type ṽårìóǘş kïņḑş õf åçĉëñţş äņḑ şẙḿbôĺş not found on the keyboard itself...

Docker is a container engine for the Linux operating system. It leverages two Linux kernel functionalities, chroot jails (or, nowadays, the pivot_root system call, but the details don’t really matter here) and namespaces, to create containers, or isolated environments where you can run processes separately from your host system. This has roughly the same advantages of virtualization: isolation (not), portability, separation of concerns, reproducibility. These are all good things for a lot of applications, including CI, orchestration, resilient setups, etc...

A few months ago, my father bought himself a water purifier. It’s a quite convenient and eco-friendly device which filters tap water, and optionally cools it and carbonates it, eliminating the need of buying bottled water entirely. The company that sold it to him also sold him a stand-alone faucet, as a replacement for his old one. This new piece of hardware is actually two devices in one: it has pipes for cold and hot water, like a standard mixer faucet, and also an additional pipe with no valve, directly connected to the water purifier...