For many years (decades) I’ve used one form or another of an X11 server on Macs to run various Linux/Unix graphical utilities with the latest server being XQuartz. The problem is that in the time since I switched to using Nix for my package management, I have twice encountered issues where the XQuartz build is broken. Combine this with the fact that XQuartz is really no longer maintained, this raises the question on whether I should be using it any longer.
A couple of months ago, I started using Nix on the Mac instead of homebrew. This included setting up home-manager and nix-darwin. There are a lot of setup guides on these and I’m not going to repeat that work. I will mention some pieces that I found particularly annoying and their solutions.
Nix allows you to specify multiple repositories where it can fetch code. However, getting this to work with home-manager can be annoyingly difficult to figure out, especially if you use a flake with multiple files like myself. This is how I got it to work:
In one of my previous posts, I talked about the phrase our democracy and how those using the phrase do not intend the word our to include the general public. However, in the past few weeks I saw on X that this is far better described by substituting the word bureaucracy for the word democracy (as reiterated by this tweet by Elon Musk).
So there you go: Trump is a threat to our bureaucracy. It’s true and that exactly why people elected him. The people want a threat to the bureaucracy to bring it to heel. The mainstream (lamestream to many of us former listeners) press tried to tell us all along but they just couldn’t get it quite right. Perhaps they believed that if they did, even more would vote for Trump?
I was looking into mechanisms to test out new hard drives and ran across the program badblocks which can perform such testing and even a script which wraps this. Though it seems that badblocks has an issue with the block count being only a 32-bit integer so if you want to perform the test on a drive bigger than 16TB, you need to use a block size of 8192 or larger. In further examination of the documentation, I saw there is an option about the number of blocks which are tested at a time and this value defaults to 64. I searched to see if increasing this value can have a speed impact and many commented that doesn’t seem to have any effect.