Hello :) on James' Blog

Ben Vorlich from Ardlui

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently become enamoured with the whole concept of Munro bagging. Prior to this trip my only previous munro was Beinn Ìme which I climbed earlier this year. I’ve been plotting some of the easier ones to get to from Glasgow on the train. Ben Vorlich seemed like a good candidate: only an hour-and-a-half-ish away on the train, 943m up (certified munro), and splendidly beautiful by all accounts.

I got the 8:22 train to Oban from Glasgow Queen St getting in to Ardlui at 9:51. This left me 6 hours or so to get back for the 16:11 train back to Glasgow. The day return cost £18.40 with a railcard.

Setting up a Dell Wyse 5070 as a jellyfin client

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Problem

Recently, I’ve been wanting to watch jellyfin on the telly at my GF’s flat. She has a fire stick - it just about does the job for watching normal streaming services. Unfortunately, my patience with Peter Crouch and his white tshirt ads has been wearing dangerously thin. So much so that I felt action had to be taken.

The simple answer would be to get the jellyfin app on the fire stick. As the telly isn’t in my flat on my LAN, connecting it to jellyfin would need access to tailscale. I came to the conclusion this would be too much to handle for the ailing fire stick and a more robust linux solution was required. Let’s be honest, I also wanted an excuse to buy another computer off ebay.

Backing up nixos state with restic

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing this so I can hopefully remember what I did in six months.

As hard as you try to eliminate all state from your computing life with nixos, the fact remains that you can’t get rid of all of it. For example, I run forgejo on my VPS. I have my config which means I could set up a forgejo instance just how I like it if everything went to pot. But that wouldn’t bring back any of the repos I had there previously.

Handy script for a more zen twitch experience

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I like to watch twitch streams. Watching them in the browser at twitch.tv is generally not an experience which sparks joy though. I’m buffering. I’m declining cookies. I’m getting spammed with notifications to claim a sick new overwatch skin. There’s a little channel point button twerking for me to click it. You get the idea; it’s a heavy noisy experience.

Over-engineered (?) nixos blog deployment setup

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As is traditional with people hosting their own blog I’m going to do a post detailing EXACTLY how I’m hosting my blog. Down to the last dirty detail. I have nothing better to talk about.

So you want to write a neovim plugin with lua

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently been messing around with writing neovim plugins. When I initially got going I found it a little tricky to know how to get started. There’s the official neovim docs which are great; but in my beginner experience exhaustive to the point of slight impenetrability. Beyond that, the thing I found most useful was simply reading the source of some popular plugins to get an idea of how things worked. I would recommend sticking to plugins with a smaller scope though.

Making nix-colors talk to neovim

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I recently started fiddling around with home-managerifying my neovim config. After moving across most of my stuff I came across the problem of how to hook things up with with nix-colors so that my neovim theme would follow color changes in home-manager.

Vanilla javascript theme toggle for simpletons

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes when I’m trawling the internet and happen upon a particularly nice looking website, I develop css and javascript FOMO. The thing I’ve been lusting after above all else is one of those fancy little dark theme toggle buttons. As you can probably tell from the website you’re looking at my web dev skills are limited. As a result of this I had assumed such niceties were out of reach.

Tailscale, caddy, and nixos containers

Tue, 16 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

For a little while now I’ve been running some services (jellyfin etc.) on an old laptop in my house. I’m not trying to sound like a podcast ad but as a networking novice, the simplicity tailscale brings to accessing these services remotely is very nice. Until recently though, I had been accessing my services like a heathen with http and port numbers (eg http://tailscale-ip:service-port). This works and is perfectly secure thanks to tailscale though it lacks a certain finesse. In an ideal world you’d have a reverse proxy and set up SSL certs so your browser doesn’t get stressed and you dont have to rememeber ip addresses and port numbers.

Learning about qtile widgets with cricket

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a person who has spent an unreasonable amount of time making minute changes to the appearance of my bar in qtile. Despite the very nice selection of widgets availabe by default with qtile, it was only a matter of time before I decided I wanted to experiment with making my own custom widget. Fortunately, if you can do a bit of python this is quite an approachable undertaking.

The dream widget I was lacking was a little live crikcet score ticker type thing; something which would scroll along on my bar showing me the score in live cricket matches. I’m sure this will interest very few people but I learnt some good stuff along the way.

Achieve peak rice with nix-colors

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As I fall deeper and deeper down the nixos rabbit hole, I find myself becoming more and more obsessed with controlling every little thing on my computers declaratively. It starts with: ‘oh this is cool I can specify which desktop environment to use in my configuration.nix’. Next thing you know you’ve discovered home-manager and every program on every linux system you use needs to be controlled in your nix-config. Of course this slightly insane approach has its downsides; it also opens some doors though.

Translating docker to nix?!

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In my opinion, there are moments when the convenience of docker and its surrounding ecosystem can’t be beat. I’ve been dabbling in the self hosting world and oftentimes the best maintained packaging option is a docker image. As a result of this I’ve been playing around with the nixos approach to managing docker containers.

nix -> docker compose -> docker run

To illustrate how to translate a simple example from the world of docker to nix let’s have a look at the config for my searxng instance.

Simple nixos config for vps static site

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Setting up a little static site is something I’ve done a few different times on a few different operating systems. It’s a slightly fiddly task with a few disparate jobs that all need looking after: ssh, let’s encrypt, nginx. In my opinion, it is one of the moments where consolidating all the little bits and bobs you need to setup into one common configuration is very useful.

I’m going to go through a bit of the nixos config I’ve got for my vps.

Python podcast scripting

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I have an old sad android phone with 2GB of ram which nowadays seems struggles these days. As a result of this I have been ‘podcast-player-hopping’ without success for the last couple of months trying to find something which doesn’t nuke my phone whenever I use it. In a moment of desperation it occured to me that a creative solution might be required. The gameplan was this:

write python script to download podcasts
set up cron job on my server to run script every couple of hours
sync podcasts across my devices using the lovely syncthing
listen to podcasts using vlc which my phone loves

For the python script I used the lovely feedparser module for easy talking to my rss feeds.

Bread dough for lazy boys

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

INGREDIENTI

flour (ideally bread flour but if you don’t have it, it’s not the end of the world)
water
salt
yeast (i use the little dried packet stuff)

RATIOS

To start measure the weight of flour; this is what we’ll work from. You can now work out how much of the other ingredients you need using these ratios:

65% water
2% salt
0.5% yeast (this amount doesn’t particularly matter, as long as it’s in this ballpark)

So if we used 1kg of flour for example, the recipe would look like this:

Multi user qtile fiddling

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This post is going to detail how I solved a very particular problem I had created for myself. First, a quick description of the problem. I use home-manager on nixos to declaratively configure what happens on my computer. In the cases where home-manager does not expose sufficient configuration options for my liking (qtile for example), I instead link a configuration file from my nixos config to where it belongs in my home using xdg.configFile. This is what I do with my qtile config.py. I use qtile on my desktop and laptop but I dont want an identical setup on the two machines. I have jumped through many different slightly silly hoops in my nixos config sort of solving this problem until the other day it occured to me this could all be achieved with my python in my qtile config.

Teeny tiny bash fetch script

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is my attempt at a neofetch, pfetch, whateverfetch style system info utility. My main concern was making something which looked nice, was easily configurable, and as portable as possible (I didn’t really try that hard with the portability). I didn’t think much about performance; I’m personally not a man who stresses too much when a command takes a quarter of a second instead of a tenth. The basic gameplan was to get an array of bash commands which would fetch various bits and bobs, then loop through this array formatting the text with ANSI escape codes. First things first, this was the associative array I came up with:

Get the thoughts out of your head and into a digital format with this python journalling script

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Since getting going with emacs I’ve gone down the org-mode rabbit hole a little bit. In particular the very nice org-journal package. It basically does what it says on the tin: maintains a journal with a selection of org files. This has been very nice for me. I have often thought about journalling but never really got up a head of steam. Somehow having an entry a keybinding away while I’m doing something with my text editor makes it a lot more palletable.

Lowkey emacs setup bits and bobs

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

About a month ago I was a little bored and thought I’d give emacs a go. There’s something fun about trying out these mythical pieces of software that have been around forever; kind of like watching The Godfather for the first time. Like many extensible, super configurable programs, emacs seems kind of impenetrable at first glance. I tried doing the tutorial but kind of glazed over after a while with the endless stream of C-a C-b C-c. There’s also the quite jarring default theme which wasn’t vibing with the lovely screenshots I had seen on the internet. Anyway, after quite a bit of fiddling I’ve landed on a simple little setup that I’ve been quite enjoying. Here are a few little pointers to hopefully ease you in.

The search for en passant checkmates 2: Electric Boogaloo

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Last time we worked out how to get info for all the games played by titled players in a particular month. Today, we have three objectives:

Parse this info for the pgn (portable game notation) of each game.
Write these to a file so we dont have to spend forever downloading them everytime we run the script.
Devise a way to convert this pgn to a more convenient pythonic format so we can analyse it later.

First of all, I wrote a little function to get the pgn from the games we downloaded. I added this KeyError exception, but if I’m honest I’m not sure why I was getting this error. Maybe, chess.com doesn’t store pgn for all games? I don’t know.

The search for en passant checkmates

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The chess.com API gives you access to a crazy amount of data on games played on the site. Armed with the knowledge that this data was at my fingertips, I set out to do what any sane person would do: find en passant checkmates. For those not in the know, en passant check mate is kind of the king of moves in chess meme circles. So some sort of python script that identified en passant check mates that occured on the site would be of great value to me.

Declarative firefox config with home-manager on nixos

Sun, 02 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As a man who finds himself reinstalling his OS more than is probably sensible, any opportunity to minimise the post install admin of sorting out all your settings is an attractive one. With that in mind lets take a look at some of the firefox (my current browser of choice) configuration options avilable to you through home-manager. This assumes you have some sort of home-manager setup working. If you do not I found this friendly githubber’s templates to be very helpful.

Upgrade your qtile setup with a cute dropdown terminal

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I didn’t know you could do this until recently, very fun and playful little feature. How you want to do it will depend slightly on how you have your groups set up but I start with importing the relevant libraries and defining an empty list.

from libqtile.config import Dropdown, Scratchpad

groups = []

I’m then able to append all the groups I want to this list. For the dropdown terminal you need the ScratchPad group which to quote the qtile docs is a “special - by default invisible - group which acts as a container for DropDown configurations”. My configuration looks like this:

Rudimentary local scrobbling with bash

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

There are lots of music players on linux. I have used lots of them, I quite like some of them. But for some reason I decided I wanted more. With this in mind, over the past few months I have been constructing a sprawling ecosystem of bash scripts all geared towards delivering a customised listening experience tailored perfectly to my every need. In short, the setup uses a simple dmenu file manager to browse my local files and mpv to play them. Today I’ll be talking specifically about my setup for recording the albums I’ve been listening to.