Aigars Mahinovs
Taking a good group photo consists of multiple aspects: hardware scouting organization preparation execution processing publishing I can say with confidence that nearly everything here comes from having failed to do these things right at least once, even on the latest attempts, so this is an...
Blog.
I have been battling Large Language Models (LLM1) for the past couple of weeks and have struggled to think about what it means and how to deal with its fallout. Because the fight has come from many fronts, I've come to articulate this in terms of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Sound track:...
Aigars Mahinovs
A question came up in private conversations, but the answer IMHO is useful generally, so this is a repost. The question was generally on the topic of divercity and outreach - if it does really help underpriviledged people to give them some handout and hope that that somehow turns them into...
Blog.
Today I have made the tough decision of retiring the Wallabako project. I have rolled out a final (and trivial) 1.8.0 release which fixes the uninstall procedure and rolls out a bunch of dependency updates. Why? The main reason why I'm retiring Wallabako is that I have completely stopped using...
Blog.
This is a copy of an email I used to send internally at work and now made public. I'm not sure I'll make a habit of posting it here, especially not twice a year, unless people really like it. Right now, it's mostly here to keep with my current writing spree going. This is your bi-yearly reminder...
Blog.
This is also known as: "ifconfig is not installed by default anymore, how do I do this only with the ip command?" I have been slowly training my brain to use the new commands but I sometimes forget some. So, here's a couple of equivalence from the old package to net-tools the new iproute2, about...
Blog.
In the Tor Project system Administrator's team (colloquially known as TPA), we've recently changed how we take decisions, which means you'll get clearer communications from us about upcoming changes or targeted questions about a proposal. Note that this change only affects the TPA team. At Tor,...
Blog.
What if I told you there is a way to configure the network on any Linux server that: works across all distributions doesn't require any software installed apart from the kernel and a boot loader (no systemd-networkd, ifupdown, NetworkManager, nothing) is backwards compatible all the way back to...
Aigars Mahinovs
Two years of midsize electric sedan experience This February (2026) marks a full 10 years since I started working for BMW, and a key employment bonus is the ability to drive a company car on special two-year leasing terms. Just before the new year 2026 started, I said goodbye to my latest company...
Blog.
During 2025-03-21-another-home-outage, I reflected upon what's a properly ran service and blurted out what turned out to be something important I want to outline more. So here it is, again, on its own for my own future reference. Typically, I tend to think of a properly functioning service as...
Blog.
I originally setup a machine without any full disk encryption, then somehow regretted it quickly after. My original reasoning was that this was a "play" machine so I wanted as few restrictions on accessing the machine as possible, which meant removing passwords, mostly. I actually ended up having...
Aigars Mahinovs
Snapshot mirroring in Debian (and Ubuntu) The use of snapshots has been routine in both Debian and Ubuntu for several years now—or more than 15 years for Debian, to be precise. Snapshots have become not only very reliable, but also an increasingly important part of the Debian package archive. This...
Aigars Mahinovs
Debconf 25 photos Debconf 25 came to the end in Brest, France this year a couple weeks ago. This has been a very different and unusually interesting Debconf. For me it was for two, related reasons: for one the conference was close enough in Western Europe that I could simply drive there with a car...
Blog.
Have you ever found yourself in the situation where you had no or anonymized logs and still wanted to figure out where your traffic was coming from? Or you have multiple upstreams and are looking to see if you can save fees by getting into peering agreements with some other party? Or your site...
Blog.
This morning, internet was down at home. The last time I had such an issue was in February 2023, when my provider was Oricom. Now I'm with a business service at Teksavvy Internet (TSI), in which I pay 100$ per month for a 250/50 mbps business package, with a static IP address, on which I run,...
Aigars Mahinovs
Debconf 24 is coming to a close in Busan, South Korea this year. I thought that last year in India was hot. This year somehow managed to beat that. With 35C and high humidity the 55 km that I managed to walk between the two conference buildings have really put the pressure on. Thankfully the air...
Aigars Mahinovs
At the end of the last part of this, we got a Home Assistant OS installation that contains in itself a Firefly III instance and that contains all the current financial information. They are communicating and calculating predictions for me. The only part that I was not 100% happy with was...
Aigars Mahinovs
At the end of the last part of this, we got a Home Assistant OS installation that contains in itself a Firefly III instance and that contains all the current financial information. Now I will try to connect the two. While it could be nice to create a fully-featured integration for Firefly III to...
Aigars Mahinovs
So now that I have something that looks very much like a budgeting setup going, I am going to .. delete it! Why? Well, at the end of the last part of this, the Firefly III instance was running on a tiny Debian server in a Docker container right next to another Docker container that is running the...
Aigars Mahinovs
A week ago I started to migrate my financial planning from a closed source system to a new system based on an open source, self-hosted solution. Main candidate is Firefly III - a relatively simple financial planner with a rather rich feature set and a solid user base and developer support....