A while back I changed my bar from Polybar to i3bar with i3blocks. One of the things I missed about Polybar is its internal CPU module, which can produce a core load graph directly in your bar by adding the right ramp characters. In this post I’m sharing a simple POSIX shell script I’ve written that does the same and can be used with any text-based bar. Here is what it looks like:

Search functionality in a small website like mine is usually arguably useless. I, for once, never even care to check whether a specific website offers it. I find a post that interests me via a search engine or aggregator, navigate to the page, read the post and then leave. However, I am not against local, serverless indexing and searching, even though most search engines provide site-specific searches. That is why I moved the search function of this website to a local, JavaScript-based implementation. How to do it? Read on.

In the last months, chimp, my old 2013 ZOTAC ZBOX ID42 HTPC, has been struggling more and more to decode and transcode high-resolution video on the fly, especially when encoded in H.265/HEVC. Thus, I set out to find a worthy successor to act as a squire to my TV. The ZOTAC still works, mind you, but it has become slow, loud and it takes ages to boot Arch Linux.

In my crusade to find the perfect replacement, I have considered recent off-the-shelf HTPCs, options with a Mini PC form factor like the intel NUCs, and some of the affordable single-board computers. It is in this last category that we find the Raspberry Pi. I have been interested in the Pi since its inception, following its developments and the various versions with mild curiosity. Finally, emboldened by its low price point, I bit the bullet and got a NinkBox Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB) kit which comes with a 64 GB SD card, a power supply, an HDMI cable and a case with a fan and three heat sinks. In this post I dump my first impressions of the little thing after a couple of days of tinkering.

In this post, I’m mirroring the Gaia Sky 3 tutorial I wrote for the official Gaia Sky documentation to use as a rough script for the workshop given in a splinter session of the 2021 DPAC consortium online meeting held on March 17 and 18, 2021. You can find the original page here.

It’s been a while since I last talked about new Gaia Sky releases. Today I’m doing a recap of the last four releases, starting with 3.0.0. This very verison came out with Gaia eDR3 on Dec 3, 2020. It was a big jump for Gaia Sky, as it introduced a plethora of new features and QOL improvements along with lots of bug fixes and little tweaks. This post goes over the latest versions from 3.0.0 to 3.0.3, and reflects on what they brought to the table.

Jump to the analysis for each of the versions directly:

• 3.0.0
• 3.0.1
• 3.0.2
• 3.0.3

If you are like me and you like your user interfaces to be as dark as possible, you have the dark mode preference of your browser enabled. You may have noted that this site has now a dark mode which is activated by default. This is done by querying the prefers-color-scheme setting in the browser. This post describes how this is done, and it discusses a few tweaks I have implemented design-wise to simplify things and remove useless visual elements.