< Notes...

These release notes are painstakingly and lovingly hand-crafted by human Ghostty maintainers, including the full changelog. They take a combined 16+ hours to write, so please enjoy. 🥰

Just upgraded to the very shiny Ghostty version 1.3.0. In a world where almost any application update boringly reads “bugs fixes and improvements”, Ghostty 1.3.0 release notes are something to appreciate, and admire.

I left my Mac’s volume too loud last night, so today while working the hourly time announcement was bothering me. It turns out you can control the volume from the CLI. It was as easy as connecting to the Mac via SSH, then:

osascript -e "set volume output volume 10"

Where 10 is the volume you want to set. Setting it to 0, well, very similar to mutting it (which can also be done, but I didn’t bother).

My Ghostty configuration under macOS, in case it is handy as a starter point for anyone. As you can see, it has one macOS specific line, and my font of choice, Hermit.

# Theme
theme = iTerm2 Pastel Dark Background

# Mouse and cursor
cursor-style-blink = true
cursor-color = #33FF33
mouse-hide-while-typing = true
shell-integration-features = no-cursor

# Key bindings (tmux pane ALT arrow left/right)
# Unbind the default word-navigation behaviour
keybind = alt+left=unbind
keybind = alt+right=unbind

# Font
font-family = Hermit
font-size = 17

# Window and colours
background-opacity = 0.85
background-blur = 10
foreground = #33FF33
maximize = true
macos-titlebar-style = tabs
split-divider-color = #505050
unfocused-split-opacity = 0.5
window-padding-x = 20
window-padding-y = 20

While I still prefer using the OS default applications, I have decided, for the time being, to use Ghostty as my default terminal application on macOS (maybe on Linux too, we’ll see). I find it fast, highly configurable—but not as cumbersome to configure as iTerm2—, and simple. Having used iTerm2 in the past, it was relatively easy for me to break my vanillist vow on this one.

The line below from this website drew a chuckle out of me. I instantly thought, “If you used vim, ‘of course’, then why did you use nano on the instructions?”

sudo nano /etc/nsmb.conf # I used vim, of course

Update: 10 Mar 2026 @ 16:54:25

Ooooh, I get it now. The author copied the contents of the gist, verbatim. Yup, makes sense. I also need to read things more carefully. 😅

➝ Via Hacker News.

Well, well, well. It is possible, after all, to create a /boot partition on software RAID10, and been able to boot from it just fine—something I tried many times, and couldn’t do. It turns out you need to flag each drive as a bootable disk, before carving out partitions, and creating the RAID10.

This section from the NetBSD man page for the sleep command cannot be funnier, yet completely valid. I mean, quite useful if you have the time, right?

BUGS

     This sleep command cannot handle requests for durations much longer than
     about 250 billion years.  Any such attempt will result in an error, and
     immediate termination.  It is suggested that when there is a need for
     sleeps exceeding this period, the sleep command be executed in a loop,
     with each individual sleep invocation limited to 200 billion years
     approximately.

Hashing known_hosts is a good idea, as it reduces the amount of information an attacker will collect, if/when (ha!) your machine gets compromised. Usually, a line on the known_hosts file looks like this:

less ~/.ssh/known_hosts
...
tilde.team ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAID1zw6+VOW8L4Rr3swbUVju3GGcknaV/fyhSJwH7NLfu
...

After running ssh-keygen -H it will look like this:

less ~/.ssh/known_hosts
...
|1|c6NiIH06AidrkPUman0oPEx6+6Y=|rPhYjXlkLgYaNR8jwaNMy7mur4I= ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIJsJP1XDyRhEPdtgBeXYm2hf4GKG9aLlqA1+ZPgBadbl
...

That’s it! Oh, and don’t forget to add to your ~/.ssh/config the following, so that future entries are hashed as well:

Host *
	HashKnownHosts yes

grep -i passwd *.log | awk {'print $7'}
...
/etc/passwd
/..%5c..%5c..%5c..%5c..%5cetc%5cpasswd
/....//....//....//etc/passwd
/..%2f..%2f..%2fetc%2fpasswd
/.htpasswd
/config/.htpasswd
/.env.passwd
/backup/.htpasswd
...

With almost 2,000 different tries—of which the above is a small sample—it seems someone is hell-bent on finding a passwd of some sorts. I don’t have one, OK?!

I miss terminal based applications. Old database driven applications that were usually accessed via VT100 terminals, and later on via IBM 3270, or emulated software, like TN3270, to access IBM mainframes. I wonder if they will ever make a return (no mainframes needed this time, of course).

Hmm, is this a sign of crossing—or having crossed—a certain age threshold?

It took me till now to install it, but worth it: bat is better than cat (and, arguably, less) in, for what I can see, almost every single way. The only thing that makes the last two “better” is that they are normally installed per default.

If you want to quickly test your disk speed on Linux (might work on macOS, but not 100% sure) simply do:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1G count=7 status=progress ; rm -f test

Decently happy with my results: 7516192768 bytes (7.5 GB, 7.0 GiB) copied, 5.10763 s, 1.5 GB/s. I figure, though, that’s expected on an NVMe M.2 SSD.

I have been struggling for days to build an ISO image that will auto-install Ubuntu workstation. Canonical’s way is to install server, then add ubuntu-desktop (and other packages needed/wanted), then remove ubuntu-server, and ubuntu-minimal-server. That’s mind boggling to me. That’s nuts.

I haven’t been able to create an “autoinstall” ISO for Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop. I haven’t found a way to make the live ISO image not to start the guided wizard GUI. As a workaround, I am using Ubuntu 22.04 Server, and adding ubuntu-desktop and gdm3 afterwards to the server install.

It turns out Ubuntu font is quite pleasant, clean, and legible. I am such a sucker for fonts!

Firefox web browser font rendering on Linux is super nice. Chromium slight blur is no match. I am seriously considering using Firefox exclusively under Linux (Wayland). For me, at least, it seems “old” is “new” again. LOL.

Going back to this, work has now provided me with a Linux (Ubuntu) laptop, and a docking station. I am to relinquish my dear Mac, and stop using (for work) macOS. I would have never thought of this happening!

Moving from my beloved iMac 2015 (running macOS Monterey), to this little abomination of a Linux desktop (because, you know, 2023 is “the year of the Linux desktop” /s).

This blog post is everlasting. Since 2018, when it was written, things have gotten worse. I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel anytime soon.

We put virtual machines inside Linux, and then we put Docker inside virtual machines, simply because nobody was able to clean up the mess that most programs, languages and their environment produce. We cover shit with blankets just not to deal with it. “Single binary” is still a HUGE selling point for Go, for example. No mess == success.

Our engagement with Canonical to deploy and manage Ubuntu with MAAS and Landscape is over, and now the “fun” begins. So much to customise, and tune! I have spent the entire day tunning and rebuilding images, back and forth. I am hoping to work on post-install scripting tomorrow.

New Red Hat owners, IBM, “f***** around, and they are finding out”. Their decision to stop publicly releasing RHEL source code is going to come back to bite them. New distros pledging to be RHEL compatible have spawned, and now SUSE and Oracle are, too, having their saying.

I don’t think this is a good news. It could mean LXD “might” get killed further down the line. That would make me—and others, I am sure—sad.

SUSE is positioning itself to take advantage of Red Hat’s changes (which has sparked criticisms). Excellent approach!

This is rubbish. Same as this. I can’t think of any other word to use for them. Canonical’s Ubuntu management and deployment tools are not even close to Red Hat’s.