Chris Irwin

I had firefox get OOM-killed today, which sent me down a rabbit hole of investigating why it was killed. Obviously I was out of memory. But after firefox was killed, the system only went down to ~50% memory usage. This didn’t turn out to be a typical page cache issue. ...

I recently had the privilege to drive a 2024 MX-5 RF (“ND3”) for a week, thanks to Mazda Canada and my local Miata group: Miataphiles of London. It was an interesting opportunity to compare with my (slightly modified) 2016 MX-5 (“ND1”). ...

In addition to moving this blog to cloudflare, I decided to take advantage of enabling Cloudflare’s proxy at the DNS level for my other (non-blog) services. Basically, this makes Cloudflare act as a reverse proxy. However, handling Firewall & Port Forwarding rules was a bit more complicated. ...

I’ve been struggling with Home Assistant notifications. From some searching, it seems other people are also struggling. A lot of videos online cover basic “How to send a notification to your phone”, but I wanted a whole lot more life-cycle than that. I want to clear them. And I don’t want to have to write a thousand action conditions, either. I sat down and spent far more time than I’d like to admit to tackling the problem. This might not fit every use-case for every person, but this was exactly the functionality I needed. ...

This is the first post after migrating this blog to cloudflare-pages hosted (pushed from gitlab.com). Why? ...

A better, more complete (with dashboard + mobile automation sync) is available in a new article: Home Assistant Notifications (with Sync in Dashboard and Mobile) The original article is preserved below. I encourage you to use the new one, though. ...

I’ve recently been porting things from Samsung Smartthings to Home Assistant. Smartthings has a significantly lower learning curve, but suffered from a reliance on the cloud. While you have a local hub, any “custom” device handlers actually ran on the cloud on Samsung servers somewhere. Which means advanced functionality was often very, very slow. ...

A coworker graciously gave me an IBM RT3200! It’s a tenkeyless IBM keyboard with integrated trackpoint. However, I did have some issues getting scrolling working properly with a modern USB-based system running Wayland. ...

Like a large number of people around the world right now, my place of work has closed the doors for safety concerns. I’m fortunate enough to be in a position to work from home via VPN, but I did want to keep some separation between my work and non-work environments. The full-separation route would be creating a new user profile on my local machine. This would ensure complete separation. I didn’t go this route because I don’t need to keep everything separate. A fair amount of my work is already isolated via RDP (to a Windows machine) or ssh (to my workstation and development servers). The biggest remaining concern was Firefox – keeping all my work logins (Office 365, issue tracker, etc) from intermingling with my personal accounts. ...

Adventures with sharing host files with a KVM VM using 9p and libvirt with SELinux.