Making the CloudFree Smart Bulb Warmer
Fake it 'till you make it!
Posted on November 27, 2023
(Last modified on November 27, 2022)
| Chase
I own a couple of the CloudFree Smart Bulbs1 that I use with HomeAssistant and the awesome Adaptive Lighting2 custom component. This trifecta makes it so the lights in my home automatically adjust to emulate the sun throughout the day. If you have HomeAssistant and haven’t set this up yet, stop reading this and go set it up!
My only complaint about these lights is that the warmest they say they go is 2000k, which is not quite warm enough for my tastes.
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Repairing the Windows Bootloader
or how I stopped worrying and started loving UUIDs
Posted on February 4, 2023
| Chase Christiansen
Overview Because I have a complete and utter disregard for my own free time, I’ve found myself moving Windows partitions around several times in the past month. There are two really fun things about this:
Moving Windows partitions is 99% sure to break your bootloader Most search results for my windows pc won't boot please fix are either out of date or trying to sell you shareware Luckily, EFI systems are pretty straight forward in how you get from power button to OS.
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Linux on a 2022 Dell Latitude 5530
Setting up Ubuntu to take advantage Dell's hardware
Posted on October 1, 2022
(Last modified on November 11, 2022)
| Chase Christiansen
For my work, I’ve recently switch to using a Dell Latitude 5530 laptop with an Intel 12th gen processor. All-in-all it is a great machine and I’ve been enjoying using it. Along with the switch to this hardware came a switch to using Windows full-time from my macOS/Linux background. Windows has come a long way, and I have actually been enjoying using it! However, I recently caved and installed Linux on the machine in a second drive so I could continue making things hard on myself living in both worlds.
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Missing Emojis in KDE
How else to stay hip with the kids?
Posted on February 11, 2021
| Chase Christiansen
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.
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Enhancing SSH
Posted on February 28, 2020
| Chase Christiansen
A recent episode of Linux Unplugged was talking about using certificates for SSH auth, and got me thinking about enhancing my usage of SSH. I stumbled upon this page with some good recommendations from the infosec folks at Mozilla:
https://infosec.mozilla.org/guidelines/openssh
Fixing Windows Hello for Business Pin Error 0x80090016
Posted on January 2, 2020
| Chase Christiansen
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.
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Memory backings in Linux Virtualization
Posted on December 3, 2019
| Chase Christiansen
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.
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Libvirt Parameters
Posted on November 2, 2019
| Chase Christiansen
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 inclined.
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
Libvirt/QEMU reference guide
Posted on November 1, 2019
| Chase Christiansen
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.
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Ghosting in the Job Market
Posted on May 7, 2019
| Chase Christiansen
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”.
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