In the past few years, I completely embraced tmux as a terminal multiplexer. Which made my Tilix terminal a bit superfluous. I tried out some other terminal emulators, and stuck with Ghostty because of the shader support. But Ghostty can be complex to configure as there is only a dot config file to manage. Zerebos has made a nice Ghostty config site, where you can pick your Ghostty options. After that, the only thing to do is to select the export option, and copy the result to your ~/.config/ghostty/config.ghostty file. I wished there were more site likewise.

Two year ago I made the swithc almost completely to MacOS. My desktop was replaced with an iMac and my laptop was gathering dust due to a second hand Macbook Air. At the time of purchase, I was pondering of replacing the hard disk with a SSD or NVME drive, but that meant prying open the iMac screen. A reluctant issue, cause there were lots of tales of people breaking the screen while doing so. I decided not to take the risk, but that meant also accepting the slow performance of the hard drive. Two years later, a login took over 4 minutes which drove me crazy. Time so for a new PC: AMD Ryzen 7, 16 GB of DDR5 RAM, a 3TB NVME and an NVidia GPU because AI. Al that goodness powered by Fedora.

What a marvelous phone my Oneplus 7Pro has been: a gorgeous screen, an incredible battery delivering 2 days of juice, and OxygenOS which delivered a snappy experience. However, 2 years later, support for the phone by Oneplus was halted, so I had the choice either to remain on Android 11, or to jump to LineageOS. The latter was an obvious choice, however, that meant that the camera quality went down and after 3 years, this became a real issue, as I took more and more pictures with my phone. I looked around for a new phone, and found the Pixel 8Pro a worthy replacement: 7 years of software support, a decent camera and marvelous software to back that up (removing people from your pictures ? No problem!). Quite happy with it, though I'll miss the Oneplus excellent screen, rounded screen edges and its 2 day battery lifetime.

Since I migrated to Drupal 10, my site has become laggy as hell. I don't know what's the true reason is, Drupal10 demanding more of the mariadb SQL server, or the abysmal disk performance of my LightSail server, or just a combination of the two. I really got so annoyed by the downtime, and the VPS was eating through my AWS burst credits, that I decided to migrate away from Drupal. As already said before, I didn't really needed a full blown CMS system for my blog: the comments were disabled since years, as it was impossible to tackle all the spam, and the baby caring of a Debian system with the ever rapidly Drupal upgrades got on my nerves. And paying more than 10 bucks per month was way too much that I wanted to spent on this, let alone the time needed for all the above.

I developed a small dbt data pipeline which pulled some Drupal database tables together in order to create a table gathering all necessary fields. This table got exported into a CSV file which was the base for a small Python script, which converted the table to Nikola pages. Only thing then left was to correct all internal links referring to my old site.

So here is the result: a fully static web site.

My current PC is well over 8 years now, and the slow hard disk is reading bits at such a slow rate that it hasn't become fun anymore. So the option was to either replace the drive with some NVME SSD, or lookout for a new PC. At some point I saw a second hand iMac for sale for a sweet price, and decided to grab it: I've become more and more charmed of MacOS as a development platform, and I recently purchased an el cheapo 2013 Macbook Air as well, which runs nicely the latest MacOS versions thanks to OCLP.


The retina display and the small form factor (well, at least compared against a full blown desktop tower) are the strong points of this machine. The i5 Intel performs still nicely (no need for fast CPU cycles) and the Fusion Drive SSD/HDD combo is still an improvement from the hard disk setup of my old PC.


The sheer size of the 27 inch screen made me dub the PC 'Battlestar Galactica'. Starship names for computers (the Macbook Air is hostnamed 'Rocinante'), and (science fiction) planet names for access point SSID names is a sweet combo.

I always wanted to dive into astrophotography, but couldn't bring myself to do it: taking long exposure pictures required in the past deep pockets: you needed a motor which carefully tracked the scope against the rotation of the earth while keeping your object in the eyepiece. With the introduction of CCD cameras, prices became more democratic, but at that time, I got myself a Dobson scope, eliminating all tracking possibilities.


Until recently, with the availability of small smart telescopes: these are small little robots, equipped with a decent camera, tracking and goto system, controlled by a smartphone app. After reading some reviews of the ZWO Seestar S50, I immediately ordered one, and the results are stunning. The fun part is that the smart scope can keep collecting light, while I remain inside on the sofa, following the results ;) Very impressed with what this little scope is capable off !

This site has been updated to Drupal 10. I had to spend way too much time on this, including some Docker voodoo and fighting with weird Bitnami settings. I still don't get why Drupal 9 was so suddenly announced as EOL. Drupal still feels more and more like a RAM where all I need is a little Honda...


Update: tried running this on a 512MB instance, it was eating through my AWS burst credits and took more of 30 seconds to respond to a single page request. The Mysql/PHP/drupal combo is quite memory intensive it seems...

How deep is the sea ? Very. There have been more people to the moon than in the depths of our oceans.

If there's one thIng I like in Azure, then it's Resource Groups. Inventory management in AWS is kinda difficult; if you're meticulous, you probably use CloudFormation or Terraform to deploy your infrastructure. And if you're truly dedicated, you probably use tags to identify projects, owners and/or creators. But if you're working in a team, it must be verified that all members use the same values for tags. I've seen too many times entries for 'Environment' like 'prod', 'Production', or 'PRD'. Which renders your AWS inventory queries either useless or way too complex.


Basically, your CloudFormation templates don't need to be littered with tag definitions: they must be programmatically added in a CI/CD chain before deployment. Programs like that are hard to find. There is Yor by BridgeCrew, but after some testing I found it to have too many quirks. that's why I developed my own CloudFormation tagging tool, called CfnTagger.


Cfntagger is a Python module which takes its configuration from an environment variable in the form of a dict:

$ export CFN_TAGS='{"Creator": "Erlich", "Application": "Aviato"}'



Then, it's just a matter of running the tool on either a full directory or a single file. You can dry-run it to verify which changes are going to be applied before actually modifying anything. Another possibility is the option of having the git repo and file which defines the resource as tags as well, so you can easily identify which resource has been defined where.

Website hosters are eating website hosters, which mean higher prices for the masses, combined with fewer functionality. So I finally got fed up with this, as the latest hoster forced me to accept a business type of hosting. Nothing wrong with that service, unfortunately my pockets aren't that deep... So I took the leap to the public cloud, where this site is now hosted.


Upgraded from drupal7 to drupal9 as well. The upgrade process included some docker instances voodoo, including sacrifying a puppy on full moon. Maybe I really should have a look at Hugo as well...