There I was: happily using Hyprland and BAM! Brodie Robertson shared a video about Niri – a scrolling window manager. It looked weird but intriguing, so I installed it. My plan was to see what it was like and go back to Hyprland. But we all know that’s not what happened.

Background

I’ve been using tiling window managers for a long time now. Back in late late 2000s/early 2010s, I was introduced to dwm. I ran dwm on my OpenBSD laptop for several years while also playing around with awesomewm, spectrwm, and cwm. Then I used a Mac for a while. But when I switched to Linux, I started using Ubuntu and its default environment, Gnome. But there were some things I didn’t like about Ubuntu, so I switched to Fedora, still using Gnome. But after a while, I switched over to Fedora’s KDE Spin. Again, though, I wasn’t too happy with Fedora and I found out about Arch Linux. Also, I really missed the keyboard-driven goodness that is a tiler.

Solution

Yad. Yad is Yet Another Dialog ala Zenity or Dialog. It allows for taking in input and passing it to something else in a similar way to the way ssh-askpass worked with X11.

A screenshot

This is how my yad-askpass window looks:

So that I can share how I’ve configured several of my applications and systems on my laptop, I’ve created a new Git project for my dotfiles.

Hope you can use them to find a different way to accomplish your goals or, even better, you find a bug or have a suggestion for me.

What are dotfiles?

“dotfiles” are generally files that being with a period in the filename. By starting a filename with a period character, they are hidden by default from many graphical file managers and the ls(1) command. With ls specifically, you can list “dotfiles” by running ls -a or ls -al.

I’ve made changes to my mobile phone, smart speakers around the house, services I use, and more.

This is my first Privacy post, but I plan to expand on my journey as I go.

I’ve done the usual things like installing smart light switches and outlets and have certain lights come on and go off at set times. The easy stuff.

But I have a few automations that I’m really happy with and proud of.

Better still, it has a high AF (Approval Factor) from my wife.

I chose Home Assistant OS for a few reasons.

First Choice

Home Assistant Container

For those that know me, you’d probably be surprised that I went with Home Assistant OS. I’m a tinkerer and like to have full control over my systems.

In the mean time, I was using KeePassXC stored in Google Drive. And Holly and I also had a shared Keepass file stored in a shared directory so we could share passwords between us.

But then I learned about Bitwarden.

So I looked into Wireguard.

Server Config

Since I use Home Assistant and it has Add-Ons available available, I decided to use its Wireguard Add-On.

I needed a solution to share bookmarks between them. And I settled on Linkding.

My Search

I looked through Reddit r/selfhost and scoured the web looking at different self-hosted bookmark services I could run at home.