Chrizzle23.com

The Clunk Manifesto

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What is a clunk?

In programming, a hack is an ugly but expedient solution to a problem. A clunk is a suite of hacks that solve the biggest and messiest of problems: lack of resources. Be it time, money, tools, or knowledge, there never seems to be enough to get it done. Hacking is about making something do what its creator never intended, clunking is about making it work with what you have. It doesn’t matter that the car makes a clunking noise, you gotta drive to work.

Git Hooks pt2

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Meat Grinder

Git makes it possible for me to only have to worry about my MarkDown files. Or, someday I will only have to worry about MarkDown files. But it is not this day.

Hugo templates are fussy tools. They’re awesome when they work, but getting to that point is maddening. And Git might as well be black magic for how well I understand it. Once I push my MD files up to the remote repo, the git hook calls ‘stage.sh’ and IT’S SAUSAGIN TIME!. The following is my cobbled together shell script to eat MD and vomit up websites. I should probably use python or something, but I am too jacked up on Mountain Dew to take on another growth opportunity.

Git Hooks pt3

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Actual Deployment

This whole “development pipeline” is a massive clunk. A collection of clunks, working together. Clunkware. I haven’t attached this deployment script to a git hook. I want a chance to look at the staging site before I push it to production. “Production” for me is when the files are updated on The VPS. Pushing a non-working site to production is, as the Irish would say, not the best. So I run the deployment script manually, which I will detail at the end of the post.

The Shell Script From Hell

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

IT’S TAKEN ME 60 HOURS TO SAVE 2 MINUTES OF TYPING

Git hooks are scripts of some kind that run when you do something in Git. Real developers (not me) use them to kick off a bunch of crap like QA tests, validation tools, sending messages to people, pretty much anything you can imagine. They do all kinds of things, but I am going to do the thing that I always do and barely scratch the surface of its potential. AND I am using it to run Bash scripts. If you are a proper dev, or DevOps type, this is your opportunity to look away.

Gitting back to Git

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Git for Windows is Trash

As you may recall, I find that having a dedicated writing environment is more productive. Getting this blog launched is a serious undertaking because I am building self-hosted infrastructure, while attempting to write about the self-hosed infrastructure, using the self-hosted infrastructure. It’s like writing about building a house from bricks while sitting in a house made of sticks that is actively falling down.

Why is the house falling down? Well, my idea of running a home lab works like this: hack, crash, patch, repeat. Most of the time I am half-way down the rabbit hole before I realize that I took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

The Art Of The Clunk

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In my opinion, the difference between a novice and an expert is that an expert has broken it before.

60% of the Time, It Works Every Time

My self-hosting and homelab experience is slowly shifting from installing and configuring servers to writing my own configs and scripts to build DIY “infrastructure”. I use the term lightly because right now it’s [not well] managed chaos. It works most of the time. The workflow is: hack, crash, patch, repeat.

Cory Doctorow on America the Technofeudalist State

Tue, 27 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Enshittification, Techno-Feudalism, and Failed States

I’ve been listening to Cory Doctorow talk about enshittification for a while now. As a long-time fan, his fiction and essays have deeply influenced my work as a hacker, writer, and activist. Little Brother shaped how I think about surveillance and resistance. Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town was part of the inspiration co-founding Hive13. His ideas about digital autonomy resonate with me.

Cory Doctorow, is a Canadian, and has clearly lived for a long time in countries with functioning governments. On the podcast he suggests that because big tech is protected by digital locks, a product of the American Digital Millenium Copyright Act, that Canada and the EU have an opportunity to hold firms like Google and Amazon accountable. He advocates for interoperability mandates, so users aren’t forced to abandon their digital communities just to escape enshittified platforms. It’s a very Canadian way to confront the problem.

Let's Talk about NAS

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Bad News from Synology

In previus posts I have talked about the necessity of a cheap NAS appliiance, but then I also mentioned a Synology as a pricey but decent device for your homelab. I need to be clear that I no longer recommend Synology. I use mine because I already have one, but I would not buy a new Synology system today.

New Synologies require you to buy your disks from Synology, (a form of _enshittification _) so unless you can buy a “pre-cataclysm” relic from eBay, go with something else, because “screw Synology and screw enshittification.

The Ouroboros Of Writing About Self-Hosting

Wed, 21 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Writing is still hard

I am trying to document the build of a system from inside the system that I am building, while I am teaching myself to build that system. This method is, as the Irish would say, not the best. In the past I bemoaned trying to learn about git, VSCode, markdown, Caddy, and Hugo all at the same time. In the end I decided to abandon learning about git for another day.

Digital Sovereignty of the Self

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a followup to my rant about the Nerd Reich

One of the uses for this site is to catalog things. Sometimes that’s snippets of code or Linux commands, but sometimes I catalog my thoughts.

I have been thinking and talking about this general idea that the Internet as I knew it in the late 90s doesn’t really exist anymore. At first, I likened it to the gentrification of a neighborhood, whereby wealthy people, and the corporations that follow them, raise the prices in a neighborhood and displace the people who already live there. Then I learned about techno-feudalism which is the idea that a few giant tech firms (Google, Facebook, Twitter) control the entire digital landscape (the land) and we the users (the serfs) generate value by using these platforms:

The Nerd Reich

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I wrote about the broligarchy but I have heard of a new term for the “Silicon Valley techno-fascists” aka, the nerd reich. I haven’t read very much on The Nerd Reich website just yet. It’s worth clicking the link just to see the front page.

I know that I said I would keep politics on my other blog, but this is a tech site, and the broligarchy is a tech industry issue, it just also happens to be a political issue as well.

Installing Docker on your Linux Virtual Machine

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A major piece of self-hosted infrastructure is https://www.docker.com/. I have a love/hate relationship with Docker. On the one hand, it makes installing and running applications easy, but on the other hand, it feels like wasteful abstraction. The point of virtualization and containerization is to make deploying applications easier. I like to do this with [https://www.turnkeylinux.org/](Turnkey Linux) containers and VMs. Like all application libraries, there is always some app that isn’t available in the flavor that you’d like. Docker has the largest library of things, so it’s basically a necessary evil.

Overlay Networks

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Running Proxmox on a cheap NAS appliance is great, but you know what’s better than that? Putting your Proxmox containers on the Internet!

Overlay networks

So far, the only private networking technologies that I have used are Neorouter and Tailscale. They both create a tunnel adapter in Linux that connects to a central server to provide secure links to devices that are not directly linked together.

I have used Neorouter a bunch in the past, and it works well. It lets me use VNC or Microsoft Remote Desktop to connect to computers at home while I am at work, school, or traveling. I have switched to Tailscale (for now) because it works better with Apple IOS devices for doing things like VOIP. Someday I will self host my own overlay network controller, like Headscale, Yggdrasil.

Publishing Hugo sites with SCP

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I keep having to re-remember how to do this:

scp -prq public/. user@vps.mydomain.com:/var/www/mydomain.com

To pull the entire /var/www directory from a remote server (to back up a published site)

scp -r user@vps.mydomain.com:var/www/ ~/wwwbackup/

Setting up a Caddy Reverse Proxy

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have written a little about using Caddy as a web server. It is a super powerful tool. So far, I have just used it to host static websites on a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_server. Here are some of the basics on setting up caddy, setting up the Caddyfile, and building a reverse proxy that we will ultimately use for connecting to your NAS appliance.

Installing Caddy

Every guide in the world for setting things up on Debian is full of sudo commands. Every Debian server that I have ever configured doesn’t use sudo. So here is a blob of Debian commands that have had sudo expunged from them:

Twitter Blocks Signal

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am never going to stop calling it Twitter. I don’t care if the world forgets. I will not.

Today on Gentrified Web Weekly: Twitter is blocking links to Signal. Which is most likely to do with whistle-blowers and the “Titler Youth”.

Broligarchy

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Listening to this week’s “The Intercept Briefing” titled “The Broligarchy” fired up my Gentrified Web neurons again. I have been venting my political energy on another site, but Elon Musk buying his way into the presidency gets close to something that I started writing about here, but never quite captured: feeling like my history has been stolen.

The Techo-counterculture

I have worked in tech for almost 30 years. I spent a couple of years out west at a startup company, where I learned about silicon valley and the brutality of venture capital. Most of my career has been spent fixing broken shit for normal people that barely understand what computers are.

Information Technology Conspiracy Theories

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A.K.A. Tech Bro Tinfoil Hat Story Time

It’s a new year, and I have decided to write something new. Well, not new, it’s pretty old, actually.

Over the years I have written about silly things like Bittorrent and Linux. But lots of people write about that. The only original thought that I have had, at least one relevant to a nerdy weblog like this one, is a collection of old computing industry/information technology pet theories that I have heard about over the years but not seen much of a big deal made about them.

Adding Infrastructure to Proxmox

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous post, I talked about the “AK-fortyserver”, a cheap NAS appliance that I added Proxmox VE to. I named mine “Scratchy”.

I got my Synology NAS backed up to Scratchy, so that I could remove the disks in it and replace them. I was buying 8tb disks for it, but I decided to go in another direction. I will discuss the that larger project in another post. Right now let’s focus on the apps I am setting up on Scratchy.

An Introduction to how I use Proxmox VE

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous post, I talked about the cheap NAS appliance as a component for self-hosting. For me, a server lab consists of two elements: storage and compute power. I have a Synology NAS that I use for the storage system. Once you get your storage centralized on a NAS, adding memory and CPU to your compute power is simply a matter of adding servers.

The AK-fortyServer

A lot has happened to me in the past few years. For most of the time I have been writing blog posts about self-hosting and my homelab, I have lived in a house where I had an office for my desk and workbench, and a corner of a basement which served as my “server room”. I sort of low key forgot what a luxury it can be to have the space to hoard old computers and the freedom to pull wires.

Blogging Workflow

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 18:21:08 -0400

Writing is hard

The whole reason that I write a blog is to cope with depression. I do little tech things, and then write about those tech things, and it serves a few purposes.

It’s a kind of journal, only instead of my feelings, I document the things I have learned. A big source of my depression is feeling like I don’t accomplish much. A lot of things in my life haven’t turned out the way that I wanted them to, and having a digital record of my accomplishments, even the small ones, helps me to look back and see that I am actually doing things.

Selfhosting as Liberation

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 11:30:47 -0400

In my last writing about The Gentrified Web, I conjured the image of the Soviet AK-47 as a symbol for self hosting. The rifle is a symbol of revolution, but also of liberation. Yeah, I know the Soviet Union sucked. But authoritarianism aside, commodity hardware in the hands of ordinary people can make a difference in people’s lives. By using commodity hardware to free yourself from the gentrified web, you can also begin thinking about other ways to free yourself from other forms of corporate control.

Hugo Themes Part 4

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 18:47:19 -0400

Just like the last post, here is the TL;DR

Without git, you should use 7zip or tar to make backups of your working site on your workstation.
There is a very specific order you should use to create new content.
Some of this mystery behavior is me not understanding what I am doing when creating “new” posts that are actually old.
IDK why, but I get better results with the Hugo test server by using the –disableFastRender flag.

When we last saw our heroes…

I had decided to remove git from my workflow. It has definitely solved the disappearing template problem. Of course, if I need to regenerate my work directory for the site, I am out of luck. So I have taken to making compressed snapshots of the directory in case I have to delete the directory and start from my last checkpoint.

More on the Gentrified Web

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 17:57:57 -0400

In my last writing about The Gentrified Web I spent too much time establishing that I am old. The writing sounded like I was saying that the web was better when it resembled New York City in a Charles Bronson film. I also didn’t write that much about why web gentrification is bad.

The thing about gentrification in the real world is that it displaces existing communities (often low income communities) in order to create financial opportunities for investors. On the web, sites like Google and Facebook stifle diverse voices and keep the flow of information under corporate control. It’s the digital version of those dystopian fictions where everyone lives in coffin-capsules and wears the same jumpsuit and eats the same depressing food.

Hugo Themes Part 3

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 16:13:15 -0400

Just like the last post, here is the TL;DR

Using git to store your entire Hugo file structure is probably a bad idea.
Using git as cloud storage for markup files is probably also a bad idea, so I’m going to stop doing that too.
Dude, you gotta run the hugo command all by itself before you copy files up to the webserver.

When we last saw our heroes…

I was complaining about the theme files randomly disappearing. I think it comes down to git doing what it’s told to do, and me simply not understanding what I am telling it to do. That’s really the only thing that I know about computers: they do what they are told to do, not what they’re supposed to do, not what you want them to do. If a computer isn’t doing what you want, you should probably take a close look at what you are telling it to do.

Hugo Themes Part 2

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 15:44:21 -0400

Just like the last post, here is the TL;DR

Git and Hugo are intertwined. So instead of working on your local copy of the site and updating that, I have had success with deleting the local branch and cloning it. This is a workflow issue with git, not necessarily a Hugo problem, but it’s been a source of inconsistency.
Hugo can be a bit fiddly. I have had situations where the theme just vanishes. I think this is an issue of cloning the theme locally vs. adding the theme as a git sub module. Who fucking knows?
Speaking of fiddly, I have been adding markdown files with the “Hugo new content posts/newpost.md” command one at a time.
Deploying the updated site is an issue I have yet to tackle. Once I am comfortable with the development process, THEN I will take on automated staging and deployment. For now, I just copy the “Public” directory up to my webserver with SCP.

When we last saw our heroes…

I was complaining about consistency. I read somewhere a long time ago that when testing new video games, the game behaving unpredictibly was more stressful than losing the game. That has been my issue with Fallout 4, and it’s my issue with Hugo.

Hugo Themes Part 1

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 09:49:45 -0400

If you are experiencing frustration with Hugo templates, here’s what I know so far

Unlike a recipe blog that tells you a long story about studying abroad in Europe before giving you the recipe, here is the TL;DR up front:

Running the Hugo test server doesn’t actually do anything. Yes, it runs a test server and serves pages on your workstation. But it doesn’t actually make the site. Once the test site looks good, terminate the server and run the Hugo command with no options. Then deploy the public folder.
Hugo doesn’t like when you add multiple MarkDown files to the site. Work on one at a time. Also, keep a backup copy of your content files outside of your main branch in git. I have broken things so badly that it’s easier to just start over from scratch with a new git repo.

If you are interested in the tale of this quest for this knowledge, please read on:

The Gentrified Web

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I was there Gandalf. I was there 30 years ago…

In the days before the original DotCom bubble, the Internet was lawless and free. Like the Wild Wild West. It was a haven for the kind of things that decent people shouldn’t be exposed to. I spent those days honing my nascent Unix skills by defacing white supremacy websites. As investment and profit found its way into the Wild Wild Web, it became civilized.

Contacting me

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

First of all, I have a boyfriend. I would love to hear from people that are interested in self-hosting, home labs, or infrastructure for radicalism. If that’s you, then please feel free using one of the methods below:

I am on the SDF instance of Mastodon: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@chrizzle23

I gave up on mainstream social media in an effort to protect my mental health. This site is a creative outlet, a coping mechanism, and a research project. I would love to talk about digital sovereignty, techno-feudalism, and other weird things online.

Selfhosting My Blogs

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Goodbye Wordpress

I am not a web developer. I have done some web development and web server administration in the past, but the state of the art has missed me by at least 2 generations. I used Wordpress for a number of years, but using their hosting keeps getting more and more limited, and the idea of hosting WP myself makes me kind of queasy. I never really learned how to do that much with WP much less how to secure it or administer it. So it’s best to return to my unix shell account days and use a static site.

Mad Max Is The Ultimate Dark Hero

Sun, 16 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is a post from my Wordpress days.

I love stories about dark heroes: characters that do good, but whose methods are harsh and violent. Basically the antithesis of Captain America. The bright hero story is usually a good guy that always does the right thing, even when it compromises something.

Probably the most mainstream dark hero is Batman. I was a huge fan when I was a kid. Especially the Frank Miller era, like Year One and Death in the Family, where Batman is basically a criminal that follows a code to just target other criminals. The trouble with Batman is that his stories, however dark, are confined by the cultural norms of comic books, where good triumphs over evil. I have mostly enjoyed Batman on film, but even there, the legacy of the comic books hinders the portrayal on film.

Stranger Things, the Satanic Panic, and Life as a Nerd in the 80s

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I spent the last two weeks recovering from another bout of COVID. This time, I had to quarantine from the family in a hotel room. As a fan of heist movies, I have always wondered what it would be like to hide out in a crappy motel somewhere. Turns out that it’s pretty boring. I watched a lot of TV.

I finished season 4 of Stranger Things. For me, the story has taken on a life of its own. Whether this season is “good” or not is kind of immaterial. I just need to experience the story. The satisfaction part will come later when I re-watch it for the second or third time.

Dan Harmon on the Sexuality of Fallout 4

Sun, 12 Jul 2020 08:57:43 -0400

This is another recycled post from my old Wordpress Blog

At my core, I am a tabletop role player. I play a lot of video games, but table top RPGs are my jam. To paraphrase an obscure Fight Club trailer, after tabletop DND, playing video games is “like watching porn when you could be having great sex.”

I so when I ahem play solo video games, there is some part of me that wants to put a backstory to either my choices or the choices the game makes for me. When I would marry Mjoll the Lioness in Skyrim and her boyfriend Aerin came along with her, I figured we were doing some kind of Viking age polyamory type thing.

About Me

Thu, 28 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Chris, a dad, a nerd, a gamer, a pirate, and a blogger. I used to be a punk rocker, a soldier, and a hacker. I write mostly to cope with depression and anxiety. I write about practical things like playing video games and my tinkering in my home lab, and I write about esoteric things like building Digital Sovereignty while surviving in a feudal corporate hellscape. I think a lot about computers, media, and the Internet in both cultural and political terms.

The Culture of the Intelligence Community and the Chelsea Manning Debacle

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This is an old post from my Wordpress days. It was written before 2016, when Wikileaks began to suck. I’m trying to decide how painful it will be to migrate my older writings to this new site.

This video is an interesting take on the Manning/Snowden leaks by Joshua Foust. Foust says that Manning’s actions jeopardized a number of diplomatic and military undertakings. It sounds very well reasoned.

Videogames and Depression

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This is another repost from my WordPress days, back when I was playing a lot of Skyrim.

I have battled with clinical depression for most of my adult life. The primary reason that I have maintained a weblog in one form or another is that writing is one of the ways that I deal with my depression. I also play video games. Writing and exercise are positive things that help me to feel productive. Video games are a tricky balance. In moderation, gaming helps me vent frustrations, much like exercise does. If I am not careful, however, gaming can go off the rails, and become basically the only thing that I do, outside of the bare essentials like not getting fired from work and keeping the children alive.

Chrizzle23.com

The Clunk Manifesto

What is a clunk?

Git Hooks pt2

The Meat Grinder

Git Hooks pt3

Actual Deployment

The Shell Script From Hell

IT’S TAKEN ME 60 HOURS TO SAVE 2 MINUTES OF TYPING

Gitting back to Git

Git for Windows is Trash

The Art Of The Clunk

60% of the Time, It Works Every Time

Cory Doctorow on America the Technofeudalist State

Enshittification, Techno-Feudalism, and Failed States

Let's Talk about NAS

The Bad News from Synology

The Ouroboros Of Writing About Self-Hosting

Writing is still hard

Digital Sovereignty of the Self

The Nerd Reich

Installing Docker on your Linux Virtual Machine

Overlay Networks

Overlay networks

Publishing Hugo sites with SCP

Setting up a Caddy Reverse Proxy

Installing Caddy

Twitter Blocks Signal

Broligarchy

The Techo-counterculture

Information Technology Conspiracy Theories

A.K.A. Tech Bro Tinfoil Hat Story Time

Adding Infrastructure to Proxmox

An Introduction to how I use Proxmox VE

The AK-fortyServer

Blogging Workflow

Writing is hard

Selfhosting as Liberation

Hugo Themes Part 4

Just like the last post, here is the TL;DR

When we last saw our heroes…

More on the Gentrified Web

Hugo Themes Part 3

Just like the last post, here is the TL;DR

When we last saw our heroes…

Hugo Themes Part 2

Just like the last post, here is the TL;DR

When we last saw our heroes…

Hugo Themes Part 1

If you are experiencing frustration with Hugo templates, here’s what I know so far

The Gentrified Web

I was there Gandalf. I was there 30 years ago…

Contacting me

Social Media

Selfhosting My Blogs

Goodbye Wordpress

Mad Max Is The Ultimate Dark Hero

Stranger Things, the Satanic Panic, and Life as a Nerd in the 80s

Dan Harmon on the Sexuality of Fallout 4

About Me

The Culture of the Intelligence Community and the Chelsea Manning Debacle

Videogames and Depression