Tech

Bits, bytes, and blinkin’ lights.

  • Check Emails From Other Accounts in Gmail—Briskly—With Go-Getmail

    TL;DR Use go-getmail to sync your indie, IMAP inbox to another IMAP inbox supported by Gmailify like Outlook.com in combination with Gmailify to achieve a (nearly) perfect Gmail setup.

    For as long as I can remember being a sentient Internet user, I have called myself a Gmail addict. I remember chatting with online buddies in the embedded Google Talk widget....

  • Build Your Own GitHub Codespaces With the Windows OpenSSH Server

    GitHub recently made Codespaces available to every GitHub user, and they’ve been getting rave reviews. Like a digital petting zoo in the cloud, a Codespace is a virtual machine built just for programming that you can access through any ordinary web browser. Code on your ultrabook, your iPad, even your phone; it’s easy to see the appeal. The promise of...

  • A Farewell to Arms: Why I’m Quitting Linux on the Desktop

    It goes without saying that 2020 has been the year of the inconceivable. And to top it all off, after daily driving Linux on my laptop for nearly a decade, I just switched back to Windows!

    Let me explain—it’s not as if I’ve given up on the Penguin OS entirely. My servers and routers continue to run Linux, delivering funny...

  • How to Fix Grandma’s Network on Verizon FiOS

    In my family, the person with the fastest Internet connection is… Grandma, a Vietnam War refugee who has never used a computer in her life. This is by virtue of her residence on a main road in the great state of Delaware, which gets fiber TV and Internet service through Verizon FiOS. She subscribes to the cheapest Internet plan so...

  • The 30-Second WebRTC Guide

    (Web technology changes fast! Mind the date this post was written, which was November 2019.)

    I get the feeling nobody uses WebRTC in the real world, since all of the tutorials use the same toy examples that don’t involve any actual network connectivity. That’s a shame, because WebRTC makes peer-to-peer communication a cakewalk. Somewhere in our imaginations, there’s a...

  • Introducing Sia Slice, My Absurdly Cheap Block Storage Solution

    Sia Slice in action. (On a remote system, with tmux.)

    Sia Slice in action. (On a remote system, with tmux.)

    I dabble in cryptocurrencies, occasionally. I hesitate to get too partisan on a subject the Internet takes very seriously, but it seems to me that the fairest judge of a coin’s value is the utility it provides to its holders. So Bitcoin is useful because everyone recognizes and accepts Bitcoin,...

  • How to Assign IPv6 Addresses to LXD Containers on a VPS

    This post was rewritten on July 26, 2019 to incorporate a cleaner solution. The original version can be viewed here.

    LXD is my favorite containerization stack. For my use case, which is running various services on the same machine with isolated root filesystems, it’s more flexible and easier to use than Docker, particularly in terms of networking capabilities.

    Using...

  • My VGA Passthrough Notes

    Introduction: What is VGA passthrough?

    Answer: Attaching a graphics card to a Windows virtual machine, on a Linux host, for near-native graphical performance. This is evolving technology.

    This post reflects my experience running my VGA passthrough setup for several years. It is not intended as a complete step-by-step guide, but rather a collection of notes to supplement the existing literature...

  • Print Your Stuff from the Terminal with utprint.py

    Recently — in the spring of 2016, I believe — the UT Austin libraries rolled out a new printing system that allows students and staff to upload documents via a web interface. This was a huge deal to me because previously, I had to get off my laptop and sign in to a library computer to print things.

    Functional but frustratingly slow.

    Functional but...

  • Prototype Sustainable Map for the UT Austin Campus

    I usually keep my writings on my personal blog and The Daily Texan separate, but I’ll make an exception here: this post is an addendum to my recent opinion column on sustainability and the UT campus map.

    Here’s how I think the campus map should look like. I took the visitor map from the Parking and Transportation Services website and...