danielittlewood.xyz

Welcome to my site, where I blog about software and open culture. See below for articles I’ve written, and browse the documentation or the source if you want to learn how the site works.

Notes about software freedom

Notes about technology generally

Everything in its right place

Ideas for how to keep your computer organised - software for tagging files, and how to manage the resulting complexity.

Migrating to NixOS

An article documenting how I installed NixOS in 2023. I was not completely happy with my installation, so there is discussion at the end about next steps.

Why do you use so many package managers?

I’m sick of being asked to choco yumbrew pip6 npm install every project on the internet. I have a package manager already - let me use it.

Tips for debugging a new server’s network connection

I was trying to install discourse on a new server, and the installer kept reporting issues with the network connection. This forced me to learn some tips about debugging a network, which turned out not to fix the issue.

Accessible Section Linking

I wrote a pandoc filter that put little anchors next to all my headers, automatically. This is how!

Magic Spells

A cheat-sheet for long commands with many options that I don’t like searching the internet or reading the manual to find over and over.

Controlling CPU Frequency and Temperature in Gentoo

When I switched to Gentoo, my laptop was warmer than I expected during normal use. It turned out that my CPU was running at max frequency all the time, which was making it consume more power (and hence warm up).

Keyboard Settings under X

Explanation of how to remap keys, assign scripts to certain key combinations, and fix broken multimedia keys on a system running X.

st - simple terminal

st is a simple terminal emulator for X which sucks less It is configured by patching the source code, which is written in C. To see the changes I’ve made, plus an explanation of how they work, take a look at my fork on Github.

Photos

I like to travel, and I take pictures when I travel. Here are a few of them:

Low Water, Coniston Coniston Water Hillside near Sawrey Knotts Wheat field, Croesgoch Sunset, Croesgoch

You can find more on my flickr.