Missing Emojis in KDE

How else to stay hip with the kids?

 Posted on February 11, 2021  |  2 minutes  |  Chase Lau  |   0 comment

I’ve recently switched back to KDE after an extended stint on GNOME. I love the polish and workflow of GNOME, but the Plasma desktop is so packed with power-user features that it can be hard to stay away for long. Of course, what I mean by power-user features is their excellent emoji support. Just like on macOS, Plasma has a button combo, super+., which will bring up a searchable emoji picker. [Read More]
KDE  Fixes 

Fixing Windows Hello for Business Pin Error 0x80090016

 Posted on January 2, 2020  (Last modified on February 11, 2021)  |  2 minutes  |  Chase Lau  |   0 comment

Background I’ve recently been deploying a new enterprise setup for my company. Part of this process involves configuring device registration with an Azure Hybrid Active Directory. We also decided to use Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) with Multi Factor Authentication (MFA). While setting up one of the machines I ran into the above screen while trying to setup Windows Hello for Business, AKA a pin for the user I was logging in as. [Read More]
troubleshooting  AD FS  Duo  fixes 

Memory backings in Linux Virtualization

 Posted on December 3, 2019  (Last modified on January 31, 2021)  |  5 minutes  |  Chase Lau  |   0 comment

Background When diving into high-performance virtualization, memory is often an area of focus. In this article, I will attempt to explain simply why memory is a concern, and the various ways that are available to you to fix it. This way, you may pick which solution fits your needs. Memory management is a key responsibility of your operating system (OS). Your OS takes the memory in your system and divides it up into pages. [Read More]
passthrough  libvirt 

Libvirt Parameters

 Posted on November 2, 2019  (Last modified on January 31, 2021)  |  1 minutes  |  Chase Lau  |   0 comment

When browsing through other peoples' setups, you’ll find a huge range of flags people set. Here’s a list of what I find important, along with what they do. The table on contents will be organized by levels to represent where each config option should go. Note that there are many more flags to explore, should you be so inclined1. domain memory currentMemory memoryBacking hugepages Specifying huge pages cputune os features acpi apic hyperv relaxed vapic spinlocks vpindex runtime synic stimer reset vendor_id frequencies reenlightenment tlbflush kvm hidden vmport ipapic cpu topology feature Here’s the libvirt XML reference for some light reading ↩︎ [Read More]
passthrough  libvirt 

Libvirt/QEMU reference guide

 Posted on November 1, 2019  (Last modified on January 31, 2021)  |  5 minutes  |  Chase Lau  |   0 comment

Background Over the past few months I’ve gotten into experimenting with PCI Passthrough using Linux virtualization. The basic premise is that, instead of dual-booting Linux with Windows for gaming, we can run Windows in a VM and passthrough necessary hardware (storage, graphics card) to achieve near-native performance. I’ve learned a lot from this experimentation. There are lots of helpful people in this community, but there are also a lot of differing configurations and no one place to look all of the various settings up. [Read More]
passthrough  libvirt 

Ghosting in the Job Market

 Posted on May 7, 2019  (Last modified on January 31, 2021)  |  2 minutes  |  Chase Lau  |   0 comment

This is less of a rant and more some observations I’ve noticed. In the past year I’ve had the opportunity to talk to people who are hiring and people who are seeking jobs. Often, each group would be frustrated with the other. A term you’ll hear a lot in modern dating is ghosting. For those who aren’t familiar, ghosting is defined as “the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication”. [Read More]
jobs  people 

Repairing GRUB on KDE Neon

 Posted on January 2, 2019  (Last modified on February 11, 2021)  |  3 minutes  |  Chase Lau  |   2 comments

Background I recently capped off about two weeks of nasty computer trouble with being unable to get KDE Neon to boot on it’s own. GRUB would boot into it’s recovery shell, and I would have to use pesky command line trickery1 to get my system running. Now, normally this is a quick fix. A little GRUB housekeeping and update-grub should do the trick. However, the strangest things were happening. No matter my changes, nothing was taking. [Read More]
grub  kde  neon  fixes 

Renewing Let's Encrypt Wildcard Certificates

 Posted on December 28, 2018  (Last modified on January 31, 2021)  |  4 minutes  |  Chase Lau  |   0 comment

Background Let’s Encrypt is a service known for how easy it is to enable SSL on websites (which you must know if you’re reading this article about renewing!). Earlier this year Let’s Encrypt added support for wildcard certificates, and with the added complexity of supporting multiple subdomains on one certificate came added complexity to renew these certificates. The other day I encountered what looks like a common error when trying to renew one of my wildcard certificates. [Read More]
ssl  lets encrypt  web 

Welcome to my site!

 Posted on December 14, 2018  (Last modified on January 31, 2021)  |  1 minutes  |  Chase Lau  |   2 comments

Sometimes (rarely) I run across a problem I’m able to fix myself. When I encounter one of these you better believe I’ll publish it here.

Also, I just need to make sure Jekyll is working with GitLab Pages properly. shakes fist at sky

welcome