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What programming/technical projects have you been working on?
This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?
I've been using nixOS for a few months now and I want to clean up my configs a bit, switch out some packages with flakes for more reliable version control, and start using Home Manager. I haven't seen any guides that show how an all-inclusive setup looks like, and how people are handling stuff like secrets and backing up other derivative configs, which is part of what has held me back from making this jump. Ideally I would also keep my configs in actual version control as well. If anyone knows of any really good guides to accomplish this, please share it with me. Right now I have a single large config that keeps growing steadily as I add in new functionality to my system.
My latest project is cleaning up my music collection a little bit. I have a lot of albums that are stored as a single audio file along with a cue file, but most players don't support this format, so I'm finally biting the bullet and slicing those up. The primary tools for this are cuetools and shntool, but I also found out there's a GUI called Flacon. It feels like a good opportunity to try vibe coding in order to get help with writing the scripts to hopefully help me accomplish this task in a single sitting.
Broadly, take a look at the flake configs scattered across github. For secret management, nix-sops is probably the way to go.
I like flacon! There's also unflac if you want to just point a bunch of CUE files and let it rip!
go install git.sr.ht/~ft/unflac@latest
I got my first 3D printer, a BambuLab A1 Mini Combo, the other day. I've been printing things non-stop. My favorite thing is printing parts for the printer. A bucket for collecting waste filament, a scraper handle, a small drawer attachment, handles for the allen wrenches, etc. I like the idea of owning something that both creates and solves its own problems.
Beyond that, it's a lot of novelty prints -- benchy, a turret from Portal, some fidget toys, and a D&D mini of a rat (a gift for a fellow player), and other little goofy things.
I'm learning a lot...like multicolor prints are a pain in the ass unless you plan things out intelligently. When I made the rat mini, it didn't have a baseplate so I fiddled around in Bambu Studio to add one. The mini was one color, the stand another. And I sunk the rant a few layers into the stand which meant for a few layers the printer had to swap colors multiple times and it took forever.
I read a blog post about using Podman and Systemd to manage containers on a server. I can't stop thinking about it. I am going to set this up with Debian and probably start running some smaller applications in my homelab like Penpot and Stump.
I wrote a script to help merge folders which share the same name excluding some folder names like "Disc 01", etc. It merges into the folder which has the shallowest depth. You can add more exclusions with -E name (add a path separator (ie. name/) to exclude all subfolders too)
I think the funnest part was creating the list of default folders to ignore. After excluding some patterns it's surprising how few common folder names there are. Seems like shallow folder hierarchy makes a lot of sense as long as it stays performant.