Evidently, the AI models trained on my internet activity, and I have thoughts.

I've been using the construct sudo run-parts /etc/update-motd.d/ to determine if recent system updates required a reboot.

Today I learned I can simply check for the existence of the file /var/run/reboot-required.

I was recently building something that was taking date input from an HTML form field, and casting it to a PHP DateTimeImmutable. I was then comparing that to another date, and got thrown off during testing when I compared the resulting instance to new DateTimeImmutable('today'); the instances were not considered equal.

I'm doing a little DB work recently, and needing to choose how to represent certain data in the database. For a few fields, ENUM would be the correct choice, but there's a possibility I would need to expand the ENUM later to add values.

My question: is this safe?

I've been using the experimental "display: masonry" CSS for my gallery and a few other areas of my website for over a year (with a fallback to standard grid columns). However, I noticed in the last few months that my browser was no longer honoring it, and finally researched what happened.

It turns out it's been renamed to "display: grid-lanes" in the CSS Grid Level 3 specification. Otherwise, everything else remains the same; continue using grid-template-columns and grid-template-rows as you did with the the masonry display.

Safari has it in preview already, while Firefox and Chrome-based browsers have it behind a flag. (On Chrome-based browsers, visit chrome://flags, and enable the "css-grid-lanes-layout" flag.)

A few months back, I purchased a Beelink EQ14 mini server for my homelab. One thing that has frustrated me has been that rebooting or even powering on... has required I have either my keyboard or my monitor plugged in (I haven't been able to determine exactly which one yet). This has made me reluctant to reboot, as I then have to switch my keyboard from my workstation over to the server, and plug the HDMI from one of my monitors into it. I hate it.

In browsing a number of forums, I saw one recommendation to switch the BIOS to use FastBoot.

~~Can confirm, works!~~

Update

While FastBoot helps, it doesn't entirely fix the issues. What I discovered was that the server was requiring my keyboard in order to boot; I tested this by rebooting the machine without cables, and plugging in only the keyboard.

Unfortunately, there are no BIOS settings to override this behavior. I dug up an old USB dongle for a presentation pointer, plugged that in, and voilá — it boots now. I suspect any USB HID dongle will likely work.

I've been using Helm recently as part of a new product offering, and as a way to deploy my various websites. Helm allows providing values to the templates in a Helm chart via one or more values files, which are provided via the option -f. It's often useful to break these into several files, so you can do things like cover common values, and then environment- or namespace-specific values.

However, the -f option only accepts a single value, and doesn't recognize globs.

I've many times wondered how I could build a Makefile that would accept arguments to pass to the command invoked by the build target. It turns out to be relatively easy.

I had an odd situation today when building and pushing a container image to a registry.

I have a private registry in my homelab. I have an internal DNS server that can resolve it when in my home network, and my machines in my home network all use that internal DNS server. Great, fantastic, just works.

Except for some reason, when running a docker buildx build --push operation, it was unable to resolve the internal name... because it was using the wrong DNS server. It was trying to resolve via the 8.8.8.8 DNS server. The Google DNS servers. Which I've not even configured as an upstream in my recursive DNS server on the local network.