terrywang

The good old Internet was "del.icio.us".

Thanks for sharing. Gemini CLI doing live troubleshooting for a K8s cluster is surreal. I am keen to try that out, since I have just created RKE2 clusters.

Thanks for sharing, insightful.

Personally, I consider Antigravity was a positive & ambitious launch. Initial impression was that there are many rough edges to be smoothed out. I hit many errors like 1. communicating with Gemini (Model-as-a-Service) 2. Agent execution terminated due to errors, etc., but somehow it completed the task (verification/review UX is bad).

Pricing for paid plans with AI Pro or Workspace would be key for its adoption, when Gemini 3.x and Antigravity IDE are ready for serious work.

Gemini CLI at this stage isn't good at complex coding tasks (vs. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor CLI, Qoder CLI, etc.). Mostly because of the simple ReAct loop, compounded by relatively weak tool calling capability of the Gemini 2.5 Pro model.

> I haven't tried complex coding tasks using Gemini 3.0 Pro Preview yet. I reckon it won't be materially different.

Gemini CLI is open source and being actively developed, which is cool (/extensions, /model switching, etc.). I think it has the potential to become a lot better and even close to top players.

The correct way of using Gemini CLI is: ABUSE IT! With 1M Context Window (soon to be 2M) and generous daily (free) quota are huge advantages. It's a pity that people don't use it enough (ABUSE it!). I use it as a TUI / CLI tool to orchestrate tasks and workflows.

> Fun fact: I found Gemini CLI pretty good at judging/critiquing code generated by other tools LoL

Recently I even hook it up with homebrew via MCP (other Linux package managers as well?), and a local LLM powered Knowledge/Context Manager (Nowledge Mem), you can get really creative abusing Gemini CLI, unleash the Gemini power.

I've also seen people use Gemini CLI in SubAgents for MCP Processing (it did work and avoided polluting the main context), can't help laughing when I first read this -> https://x.com/goon_nguyen/status/1987720058504982561

Great idea to let the bullets fly. After taking a nap, the issue was fixed by X

Text message and Authenticator were disabled, two Yubikeys present in Security Keys. I don't get the idea of this process.

Uh-oh, looks like the only way out is to unenroll security key completely (if it was enrolled when DNS rebrand was not done).

Prompted a couple of times only on the mobile device. I have a YibiKey 4 so it's inconvenient to do it with a USB-C to USB-A adapter. Ignored it for a while and eventually I wasn't able to use X without "re-enroll".

So I did it on a laptop. The process seemed legit, the entire flow was weird and not intuitive, I had to stop and read twice before proceeding (e.g. "Where to store passkey", disable all other MFA ans only use Security Key, a backup recovery code was given...). After going through all that, find myself locked out of X because of the infinite re-enroll loop, OMG.

Contacted support, let's see how long it takes. After this, I don't think I'll continue to use Security Key with X...

BimmerCode / BimmerLink makes coding/customising supported BMW models even easier, as long as you've got a mobile device and an adaptor (e.g. OBD II to Bluetooth, inexpensive), you can DIY coding and obtain visibility into a lot of the car runtime parameters (e.g. engine oil temperature, boost, etc.) - can connect a screen and display whatever you like, turn off the pesky `ASD` (fake exhaust sound pumped into the cabin via speakers...).

What's more amazing these days is that technology like `bootmod3` (bm3) makes flashing (remmaping) stage one as easy as 1-2-3. One needs to understand what they are doing though.

Thanks for the input. Had similar experience with solution based on top of on-prem flavour (gravity - name came from pulling stuff from cloud back into traditional data centre) of k8s. Countless effort and resources have been wasted on troubleshooting customers' infrastructure rather than focusing on the real goal, get apps/APIs up and running quickly to generate value and realise goals for the business. The solution ultimately become a burden to both engineering and customers... Long sad / bad story.

Fortunately, decision makes heard the voice from the field and customers, eventually offloaded the container orchestration layer (and underlying infrastructure) to managed k8s service provider, the solution is delivered as helm charts to be installed on customers' own managed k8s (EKS, AKS, GKE and OpenShift - oh, the Red Hat OpenShi(f)t is just another rabbit hole...). But again, lack of knowledge and hands-on skill operating / running k8s (not yet a commodity although it is hyped to be...) makes the journey quite turbulent from a business PoV (technically it's easy, built the skills in house, hire the right talents).

Make sure you read it ;-) I tried to finish reading it in 5 mins but fell asleep on bed, didn’t finish until now, will do that after getting up.

Started using Cockpit when installing Fedora 21 on the old dog NAS - HP ProLiant MicroServer N54l), it has been continuously improved over time and become a easy to use & robust Web UI for beginners (very intuitive, e.g. enabling metric collection will trigger toggling `pmlogger.service` and so on), even CLI warriors love it as a supplement.

Found it a useful single point of view / administration covering networking, storage, virtualization, containerization, etc. when managing a small group of servers over nebula (overlay network), across home, multiple cloud service providers. Haven't used it at scale though, will dip into it when time comes (it supports FreeIPA).

The problem with running Pi-hole on the Pi 1 (original) is that it does not have enough physical memory after installing pi-hole stack (I used Nginx + php-fpm for the web UI), otherwise there is way to use utils like `vmtouch` to read the sqlite database file and keep it in page cache, even "lock" it.

On Pi 2 and 3 it's no longer an issue (even if you don't do anything about it) to a memory buff and better I/O (using faster micro SD).

Pi-hole provides a mechanism to backup and rotate the database from time to time, one can do that whatever way suits their use cases.

Running Pi-hole on the original Pi (1) model B for over a year and really happy with it. The original Pi running Raspbian has been very reliable and working tirelessly, the only problem is the I/O bottleneck - performance querying SQLite database is unbearable.

Last Nov I spent half day installing Pi-hole on spare Pi 2 and Pi 3 (Ubuntu LTS) serving as two internal DNS Servers for home network), router (AsusWrt-Merlin) as its upstream doing DoT (DNS over HTTPS). Really happy with the performance and cost (quite, low power consumption, no heating issue, no dust collection issue, etc.)

Attracted by the title, clicked thru and interestingly found the website is named "Windows Central".

It has been the fact for me since 2003, not for gaming though ;-) Don't get me wrong, I do think gaming on Linux is cool and it helped at picking up new "Linux desktop" users.

What's more interesting is, with WSLg it is even possible to run GUI (X / Wayland).

Podman is not (YET) a drop-in replacement for Docker CE (on Linux), at least for me (even after 3.0.0 release when it adds seamless Docker Compose support, the way it does it contradicts daemon-less...).

Deploying stacks (on Linux) Docker Compose style are typical use cases for using Docker, `podman-compose` works sometimes, however, over half of such initial attempts fail and require tinkering.

Docker CE (at least for Linux) is still the best option when the use cases are simply clone the repo & deploy/run the stack using `docker-compose up -d`, it simply does the job at the best cost.

podman / buildah / skopeo trio is definitely worth learning, podman can be very useful to migrate containerized workloads from local / standalone dev machines to production k8s clusters, by leveraging `generate kube`.

It makes sense because you shouldn't want messaging app's backend to transfer your device specific private encryption key across all your registered devices.

Not on by default for 1 to 1 chat but it (Secret Chat) is optional, drawback is that the end-to-end encrypted conversation stays only on the devices initially it was initiated, because the encryption keys stay only on those 2 devices.

For Telegram Group Chat - it is not end-to-end encrypted, Telegram uses distributed infrastructure approach to protected data not covered by End-to-End encryption. I wouldn't consider WhatsApp's Group Chat end-to-end encrypted.

I was given a Latitude 5300 2-in-1 running Windows 10 by a client for a short term project last year, there were multiple `big bro` installed on it so I didn't bother to tinker it much other than requesting local admin access so as to install WSL2 and Ubuntu in order to build a productive environment to get things done (implement a flavour of K8s distribution in fully air-gapped environment). BIOS is password protected so I can't even run USB Live Linux distros (to test performance of the hardware or play around).

Some interesting observations:

  1. fan spins crazily for no reason randomly, and the laptop seemed to be always heated (in comparison with MBP and other laptops running Linux).

  2. it can become overly hot and fan can spin even if it was in sleep! This was scary so after seeing it once I tend to power if off whenever finishing using it. Some times it didn't wake up, giving a QR code (BSOD...)

  3. the not-too-bad specs failed to pump out expected performance (so sluggish), in comparison with similar hardware running Linux x86_64 or macOS (not surprised)

NOTE: Feeling lucky that my kids school allows BYOD, simply picked M1 MBA for both to avoid the Windows debt (in most cases hardware is not to blame, I've used many Dell Latitude models with positive impression).

Btrfs is flexible and works well for self-hosted home storage use cases, especially running cheap hardware & HDDs with mixed RPM + capacity specs (many consider it a major advantage over OpenZFS on Linux which inherits ZFS pros and cons). As far as data corruption is concerned, avoid using raid{5,6} profile (that governs how a chunk is replicated within or across a member device) for data and you should be fine.

Running OpenZFS on Linux also requires dealing with DKM(ES)S, Ubuntu being an exception (hmm)...

NOTE: Self-hosted podcast show episode 25 contains excellent coverage (ZFS vs. Btrfs) by Jonathan Panozzo from Unraid.

It seems to be good news for Kiwi expats who wants to go home. Income may shrink (in comparison with US) but quality of life improvement may be significant. However, for those who do not own a residence in Auckland (suffering from even worse housing unaffordability issue than Sydney) may need to move outside of Auckland metro area to get more significant QoL gain.

NOTE: A colleague of mine moved back to Wellington (his home town) from Bay Area at the beginning of 2020. I have done a few Zoom / Facetime catch up with him since, he seems happy, energetic and refreshed (positive), stark contrast to the him back in 2018-2019 (SF / Bay Area). Looking forward to visit NZ once the travel bubble reopens.

nix is really nice (finding it much better than homebrew cross macOS and Linux) and do good jobs at the best cost for some of my uses cases (kind of binenv / arkade, etc. that manages some binaries that the target hosts use). However, nix has its own problems that I may not qualified to comment (not savvy enough user) - a bit of learning curve (NixOS vs nix package manager) - memory hogging while running system-wide update - disk space consumption is a mystery (GC & optimisation doesn't do good jobs freeing up space)

Don't get me wrong, I do like nix ;-)

Almost everyone has been through that "mine is better than yours" distro war phase, adopting Linux (distros) as a religion is just stupid ;-)

Some of the gold I've accumulated over the years when converting Windows users and/or giving talks

  - All Linux distributions are the same: the Linux kernel, glibc and a bunch of GNU utils.
  - "Adopting Linux like a religion is stupid." - Thomas Cameron
  - "We've all been through my distro is better than yours" thing.
  - "The best Linux distro is the one that does what you need at the best cost."
  - Linux is NOT about the distribution but the kernel, it's about what the kernel can do.
  - Distribution is a way to wrap up what the kernel can do into a more manageable way.

Good to know, it was enlightening to have the opportunity to see, think and experience different than the majority (others). I didn't realise back then it would have such an impact on me and the journey forward.

I wrote this at Linux's 30th birthday: Building a skill tree around Linux has been the best investment I've ever made for the past 18 years. I believe it is likewise for you ;-)

I dug out the 3 CDs and box Mandrake Linux 8.1 came with (2 are Mandrake 8.1 and 1 for fonts + input method framework) in the attic last time I visited my parents house ;-)

For those who are interested to see how properly copyrighted Linux were sold in the 2000s in China -> [https://twitter.com/terrywang/status/1108847424498331648]

Grew up in China, the first Linux distro, in fact non-Windows OS was Red Bar Linux 6.3 (I form of CDs sold in those pirated software shops, never saw Linux on floppy), no one else around me use anything other than Windows (99.99% pirated). It opened up a door for me, later on I bought Mandrake Linux 8.1 (with Chinese input method and fonts - displaying CJK was pain back then).

Fedora Core 1 was my main desktop and the (Distro Hopping & learning) journey continues, and picking up the skill tree around Linux brought me where I am today ;-)

Note: Tried Slackware 10, like its KISS and BSD style rc but it wasn't liveable for me back then. Stuck with Fedore (Core) for very long until Ubuntu 6.06 (Canonical post CDs) and later tried Arch Linux (very close to Slackware before the systemd migration...).

The existing appliance model will continue to be maintained (until upstream EOL it - or when the support agreement ends).

In the meantime, to address the same requirements from customers who wants some control (K8s stack, VMs, networking and storage are theirs), managed K8s' on-prem distribution may be the answer, I'll be exploring EKS Anywhere see how it works and see if it's a viable option to replace the appliance model moving forward.

Telekube (renamed to gravity by Gravitational - which has again rebranded to Teleport ;-)

Open source edition: https://github.com/gravitational/gravity

Note: We have been using its 5.x branch (tracking K8s 1.13.x) for a long time. That's why later on BYO K8s model was introduced ;-)

AWS is lagging behind on managed K8s on-prem for air-gapped environments, consider Google had GKE on-prem (now a part of Anthos) long ago, and Azure offered AKS on Azure Stack HCI. Finally AWS caught up, feature parity between the big 3.

Adoption will be interesting to see.

I've worked on gravitational (gravity / telekube) flavoured K8s distribution designed for on-prem data centre deployment models for the past few years. Those customers will eventually move to 1. managed K8s (good on them) or 2. continue to self-host K8s to satisfy their building one's own PaaS goal lol (in that case, it's better be managed K8s' on-prem variant from GKE/AKS/EKS). For the same K8s solution's other model - BYO K8s, I see rapid adoption of AKS (vs GKE, EKS is the dominate from beginning as it was the first supported).

On gravitational: Recently I heard gravitational has shifted focus (and rebranded) to teleport (secure cloud access gateway - used to be a part of gravity), around their Series B funding round, after all, investors are looking for a business model that can bring them profit (and exit). On the other hand, `gravity` - `pull the stack from cloud` - where the name came from - which addresses specify niche market does not seem to have generated much revenue over the last couple of years.

This is going to happen sooner or later, the pandemic accelerated it, exploiting and abusing the liberty of people will be the new norm - 1984.

Observation: at least in NSW it seems that most people trust the government and cooperate with government orders (Digital Tran formation for public service is on the right track, see the delivery of digital driver licence and all other perks and all other self-service integrated services, at the cost of giving up some personal info and privacy (state government says that we can trust them for securing the data/info)...

I have been living in Sydney, Australia since 2008. Agree that country is facing tough and worrying economic outlook for the 2020's. It was seriously `lucky country` (mining boom, Rise of China, etc.) when I first landed in SYD, however, with the deterioration of Australia-China relationship, and the undiversified economy structure (mining, education, tourism, etc.), the "lucky country" is going downhill towards the "luckin coffee" direction LMAO.

The country is run by politicians holding law and/or accounting degrees with no social responsibility or morals (in comparison with Germany and northern Europe), who are good at making taxation (or similar) laws but with no vision for the country's future (geopolitical influence, economy, etc.). Most people underestimate the stupidity of government and central banks, keep printing $ (QE) and pump the money to the banking system, making the asset bubbles bigger, while failing to stimulate the real economy, most $ went into the construction industry)

All bubbles pop, there is no exit strategy for QE... Recently watched "The Big Short" again and seriously history is repeating itself, so similar. Good luck to the people live in the "lucky country", keep doing what you believe is right, manage risks well (I know many family highly leveraged into investment properties), stay healthy stay sharp ;-)

"The world is sinking, people ware partying."

  Housing "un"affordability will cause negative consequences for the society: psychological problems -> family problems -> community problems -> social problems. Politicians don't care, only focus on winning the next election, they they come and go, they've got their exit route well covered...

NOTE: Recently Deirdré Straughan moved to Australia with Brendan Gregg, you may be interested to know some of the reasons behind the move, I assure you that will be good reads: https://www.beginningwithi.com/category/women-in-technology/