Chris Irwin

GNOME has a wonderful feature of grouping applications in the Alt+Tab menu. Pressing Alt+Tab lets you quickly switch from Terminal to Firefox, without having to iterate through each of your multiple Terminal or Firefox windows. The issue is that not all Terminal windows are equal. Perhaps you’ve got specific dev tools you want separated from other Terminals. In my case, I use mutt for email, and I want to be able to quickly Alt+Tab to my email without having to sift through a half-dozen terminals I’m using for other things. ...

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. ...