chilli's blog

Adguard Home as a container in Fedora Server

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Setting up Adguard Home as a container in Fedora Server

Apps I use daily & some alternatives

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Apps I use on my Fedora laptop on a daily basis

Fedora 43 cosmic spin post-install notes

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 21:49:57 +0000

Fedora 43 software and config that I did post install

My thoughts on Fedora 43 Cosmic Spin and my ThinkPad X1

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 21:27:42 +0000

I recently - as in two days ago - bought a ThinkPad X1 off of eBay, and decided to try Fedora 43 Cosmic Spin out on it. I want to sell my MacBookPro M1 as I rarely use it. I find that I’m using Linux more and more these days. I have my iPhone and iPad Pro for everything Apple, so the MBP is relatively superfluous in the grand scheme of things. I still have my work ‘spare’ laptop which runs OpenSuse Tumbleweed (TW), but it has a truly terrible keyboard and screen. This Dell has now been superseded by the 16Gb/512Gb/2.8k OLED screen. Yea, welcome to #FirstWorldProblems - lols.

My first container using Podman

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 10:16:00 +0000

One of the reasons I got myself a home server is so that I can learn about containers. I’ve just got my first one set up, and as this was my first ‘rodeo’ it certainly took a while, but it turned out to be really quite easy in the end. So, here’s how I did it, and just as importantly - also what I learned.

podman and quadlet

I decided that I wanted to see if I could run a Minecraft server on my home server - because, why not? I’ve never had anything to do with containers before. However, I’m not an expert, but looking through the MicroOS docs I knew that I needed to use podman, which is like Docker, and that it came pre-installed on MicroOS. Later on, I realized that there was another app called quadlets - it’s now merged into Podman since version 4.4 - that has really good functionality that I should use.

Installing token2 FIDO token on openSUSE Tumbleweed

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 00:11:00 +0000

Setting Up a Token2 FIDO2 Hardware Token on openSUSE Tumbleweed

I recently purchased a USB-C FIDO2 hardware token from Token2 to use with my openSUSE Tumbleweed installation. Unlike standard Yubikeys, this device doesn’t work with the default Linux Yubikey software, so you need to build the Token2 software yourself. We’ll be building libfido2, which will allow you to use your Token2 key. By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to view your hardware information through a basic GUI (gui.py) or via a more useful shell script that lets you actually interact with your Token2 key.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) - what my job entails.

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 22:16:00 +0000

I sometimes write about what I’m doing outside of work and never really talk about what I do as my day job. I’m responsible for the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems at the company that I work for, across EMEA and APAC regions. I’ve been in the EDI world for about 20+ years now, and I usually have a blast in what I get up to on a daily basis.

Goodbye Arch & hello OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 15:07:00 +0000

Recently, there was a discussion on omg.lol’ers about which good Linux distros are worth trying, and someone during the discussion mentioned Fedora Sway. So, I decided to overwrite my lovely Arch & Hyprland install on my Dell laptop, and install Fedora, which ultimately led me to installing openSUSE Tumbleweed.

I started off with installing the Fedora Sway edition, and I have to say it mostly just works, and as a bonus it doesn’t have a garish colour scheme (here’s looking at you, Manjaro!). But after using it for 48 hours, I felt too constricted with the guardrails/distro decisions that they put in place—to be clear, all distros will, to a certain extent, put guardrails in place. For example, I wasn’t able to use systemd-boot, nor systemd-networkd. The power management out of the box really did not work well with my Dell laptop. I also wanted my regular dopamine hit with regular updates to Linux apps much like I had with Arch, so I realised quite soon that I really did want to continue using a rolling release distro. Fedora, I believe (happy to be corrected), updates their distro twice a year, and I think that Fedora 42 is coming out in a couple of months.

Subscription Changes and saving money

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 14:31:00 +0000

I’ve not written anything on my blog in quite a while - apologies for that! I’ve been making some changes to my IT subscriptions recently. Some of it is simply pruning out software I no longer use (cost savings), and some involves merging providers to avoid paying twice for the same service.

Microsoft Office - £79.99 pa → £0

Recently Microsoft announced they would be including AI in their Office 365 subscription at an additional £30 p.a. While I still have mixed feelings about AI encroaching on our lives, I simply couldn’t justify the extra expense. I don’t use Office very much anyway, and I realized I could simply use the Apple Suite (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) for the odd times I need an office suite. The Apple suite is free, and as I’m heavily ensconced in the Apple ecosystem, I can use this on all my Apple devices without issue. I also have all the AI access I need via my Kagi.com subscription. This was primarily a cost-saving initiative.

Arch packages I install on a clean Arch install

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 18:38:00 +0000

Here’s a list of no-nonsense packages that I immediately install after installing a fresh arch linux, and just as importantly why I install them.

These are what I install because I might find the linux default apps - here’s looking at you man pages - are just too much hassle to use. Life is hard enough, so why make it harder for yourself?

Eza

Homepage | Arch page

It brings colours to your ls commands! It’s also a more modern-day equivilant to ls, and it’s written in Rust.

Arch Linux - I made a booboo!

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 12:14:00 +0000

Never underestimate the power of my human stupidity.

So I opened my arch linux laptop to update Arch using pacman. Whilst doing that, I realised that my battery was at a stunning 6%, so I picked up the power cable, and plugged it into my laptop. two seconds later my laptop simply shut-down, mid-way through the mkinitcpio stuff. Why? Well, the eegit writing this blog post hadn’t checked to see if the other end of the power cable was actually plugged into the mains. Doh! Whenever I then started my Dell, it simply sent me to the BIOS screen, like the good BIOS that it is.

That was quite a break!

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 23:00:00 +0000

Well that was quite a break, huh? Sorry, life has been busy recently, and now I have a bit more time & probably more truthfully more inclination to continue with posting to my blog.

I’ve been playing around with porkbun as a new Domain registrar, I’ve used name cheap for years, but the good folks at omg.lol pointed me towards porkbun.

porkbun.com

It’s a typical Domain registrar, people rave about it online, but well in my opinion, it’s, you know, OK. I’m not sure what I imagined porkbun to be, but at least I now have 3 domains with them. In my not so humble opinion; It’s simply a Domain registrar that does Domain registrar things quite well. I like the fact that it has WHOIS privacy on by default, but then so does Namecheap. I probably saved a couple of dollars on the 3 domain names that I bought, using PorkBun rather than Namecheap, and hey every little helps, right?

What I'll be blogging about during WeblogPoMO 24

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 08:41:22 +0000

I’ve been thinking about what I can blog about during the whole month of May for WeblogPoMo 24 - it does start tomorrow after all! I think that I’ll mostly be blogging about getting my genealogy blog set-up, along with perhaps my own personal mastodon instance - the two will be related. I really do need to do something with my genealogy blog, which currently is practically non-existent. So, this is a good excuse to do something about it.

Weekly Notes - Wk. 17/24

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 12:14:24 +0000

What’s caught my attention this week - Wk. 17, 2024

👨🏻‍🎨 Andy Carolan’s ko-fi webshop. Does amazing, custom User Avatars; see how cool my funky chilli one is? I’m totally thinking of asking him to do some more for me! At least 3, then I’m going to have some stickers printed. I won’t apologise.

👨🏻‍💻 tinylytics Privacy-focussed web analytics for your websites. Reasonable price, nice company. Allows you to add kudos, country flags of visitors, monitor system uptime, and a hit-counter to your blog. All for $60 /year. Bonus.

WeblogPoMo - May2024

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 08:13:05 +0000

I’ll be joining WeblogPoMo - May 2024!

Now, I haven’t written too much on my blog so far, but I’d like to do more. When I heard about @anniegreens WeblogPoMo, I figured I would go ahead and join in the fun!

WeblogPoMo stands for Weblog Post Month, and every day of May I’ll be writing and publishing a blog post. Some of my posts maybe shorter than my usual length, and some maybe longer; I’ll be blogging every day so time maybe limited. You can follow along by subscribing to my blog with RSS, or following me on Mastodon. Blog posts will be auto-posted to Mastodon thanks to @rknightuk’s fantastic EchoFeed app.

My subscriptions What I pay for and why!

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of subscriptions try to hit the ‘price of a cup of coffee’ price point. So I thought I’d list my monthly subscriptions, and talk about the value that they provide to me. If I pay a dollar amount, then I’ve converted them to GBP, as that is what I actually pay.

My Annual & Monthly subscription prices

Bear blog hosting: £4/$5 /mo

This blog is hosted by bearblog, and I pay them £4/mo to host it. Bargain. Privacy-focussed to boot. I get the blog hosting, I also get to appear on the ‘discovery’ tab when I publish a post, and that brings some visitors to my blog, so I don’t feel exactly like I’m talking into a total void. It also comes with analytics, which on the whole is not bad at all, and it’s privacy focussed to boot. It also allows me to personalise my blog through themes, and I can also configure them how I want. I’m not a big fan of css, but bearblog has my css logically laid-out, so it’s quite easy to amend this to suit my needs. On the whole I’m happy with Bear blog, and I’ll certainly keep using it for the foreseeable future.

積ん読 The Japanese art of buying books and never reading them.

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever walked into a bookshop, bought a book (or two), and then once home, the books have sat there on your bedside table for a very long time. Unread? The Japanese have a word to describe this 積ん読 (Pronounced: Tsundoku). My immediate thought on hearing this word for the first time - and then understanding what it means - was why on earth don’t we have this word in the English language?

omg.lol - what?!

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I spent $20 last night. I’m just not sure on what, exactly I spent it on - if that makes any kind of sense? Last night, I came across omg.lol, and now before you scoot off and visit the site, I suggest you practise your squinting, or at the very least perhaps put some sunglasses on before you do. The colours on their site are pretty wild, consider yourself warned. So, here’s the link. Are you ready? omg.lol.

how I de-googled (as much as possible).

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 14:21:52 +0000

I, like many, decided a while ago to de-google my life. This post is about my reasons behind doing it, what I have achieved, and just as importantly what haven’t I been able to de-google?

The service offering from Google is strong. There’s a bunch of really useful tools - for free - that the average person can use in their daily lives. This could be for example Google Mail, Google Docs, or Google Maps, to name a few. I decided a while ago to stop using as many Google products as possible, because of their privacy policy. Their privacy policy is, it’s fair to say ** checks notes ** not very good!

ideas

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 13:45:00 +0000

Broad topics covering things that I’d like to better understand:

AI and how it’s going to impact search engines
Improve my understanding of personal online privacy
Try to find a couple of Linux cli projects to learn either basic rust or python coding. I’m open to suggestions! 😊
Better understand Linux containers, and immutable OSs.

I plan to write some future blog posts on:

A new (to me) rust or python project creating a Linux/mac cli utility that connects to Kagi.com APIs to enable command line web searches.
A cool German VPS hosting company, I recently came across, offering pay what you can.
A cool Swiss email company that I’ve used for years
how I de-googled as much of my life as possible, with some exceptions!

How to tweak Bear Blog

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 10:38:54 +0000

The documentation for Bear blog (that this blog is published on), can be a bit on the technical side. Here’s a non-technical article so you can set your blog up, how you want to.

There’s been a couple of things that I wanted to change on my blog, once I’d chosen my theme.

buymeacoffee.com

If you look at my footer, you’ll see a link to my ‘buy me a coffee’ page, I really don’t expect a lot (if anything), but I am curious to see if anyone will! You will obviously first need to sign up to either ‘buy me a coffee ‘or perhaps www.ko-fi.com, if that’s your preference.

It's time to talk about Kagi.com

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 22:39:43 +0000

Kagi.com is a paid-for search engine, that’s around 2 years old. I’ve been using it for about 4 months now, and I’m super impressed with the results.

I’ve not been happy with Google search results for quite some time now. They’re having to walk a thin line, in my opinion, between keeping their customers happy - whilst still having a very mystical SEO process - and generating reasonable search results for those who are using google search. I was also not very happy with myself being the product of google search - as they say; if it’s free, you are the product. I don’t want adverts being flung at me every search that I do - I simply want an answer to my question. So, I had a look around to see what else I could use.

Useful Stuff

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 12:38:00 +0000

Here’s some useful things that I have come across in my life that I currently enjoy using:

Tech Companies

Search engine: kagi.com
Domain registrar: Porkbun
Email Hosting: proton.com
DNS Provider: desec.io
Hosting provider: Upcloud
Linux Distro: openSUSE | Fedora
Online Community: omg.lol
Home Networking: unifi

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

My home ‘IT-strategy’

So I have a bunch of stuff at home using Linux, and it covers most types of things. Let’s look at each one, and see what I use my home IT equipment for.

Laptop

This is my daily driver running fedora cosmic spin. It’s an 11th-gen ThinkPad x1 carbon with an Intel i7 13th gen CPU, 16 GB RAM, 500GB nvme drive, and a great 2K OLED screen. It’s where i create my blog posts, manage everything on my network, surf the internet, and use social media etc. As my daily driver - it’s my go to for well, pretty much anything.

about

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

About chilli.sh

Hi there! I’m James—though most folks know me as chilli online. I’m a UK-based tech enthusiast, privacy advocate, and cat dad to two mischievous furballs, Gary and Mabel.

By day, I wrangle integrations and business change in a Windows-dominated IT team. By night? That’s when the real fun begins. I tend to dive into:

Linux (Fedora is my daily driver, with a soft spot for tinkering on my home server)
Genealogy (uncovering family stories and historical rabbit holes)
Languages (learning, breaking, and occasionally speaking them)
Online privacy (because the internet should respect boundaries)
Cool tech (startups, open-source projects, and anything that makes me go “How does that even work?!”)

This blog is my digital scratchpad—a place to document discoveries, rant about tech quirks, and share things that make me geek out. If any of that resonates with you, welcome! Let’s nerd out together.

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000