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JanMaon The Last Cigarette: Cinema’s most seductive prop

> It's a terrible, smelly, health-destroying habit, and I was right to give it up, but I think I'll always be a smoker at heart.

It's incredible how much I can relate to this. I finally managed to quit smoking after multiple attempts but I would still say I will always be a smoker at heart. I loved smoking and probably always will.

JanMaon Ask HN: How much gas we could save in EU if we reduce our heating temp by 3°?

How happy are you with the infrared heating? I've been thinking about getting some as well

JanMaon Ask HN: Are there any 4K “dumb” televisions?

There's a German manufacturer called Medion [0] who offers some "dumb" TVs without any smart features. Not sure if you can buy their products in the US though

[0]: https://www.medion.com

JanMaon Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

I used it a lot while pursuing my electrical engineering degree. It's ability to solve almost any mathematical formula and to show you the solution step by step is just plain awesome.

I guess it's safe to say I would not have passed some algebra and electrical engineering exams without it.

One tip I have (not sure if it still works though): Buy the Android or iOS app for a few bucks to get access to the step by step solutions if you can't afford the pro subscription.

JanMaon Waydroid – Run Android containers on Ubuntu

You can, all you need to do is to extract the widevine binary from a ChromeOS arm build and put them on your Pi/ARM board.

Admittedly, it's a bit cumbersome to do this, but it works very well. I've been watching Netflix on my Raspberry Pi 4 for over a year using it.

Also, according to this guy [0] you now seem to be able to just install libwidevine in Raspberry OS. I haven't tested this yet though.

[0]: https://lemariva.com/blog/2021/04/raspberry-pi-amazon-prime-...

JanMaon Rustdoc résumé

I definitely agree with you. Manjaro is a great distro and I have used for multiple years. I especially liked that they offer such a broad range of supported desktop environments, each with their own downloadable ISO image.

If you are looking for something that's closer to pure Arch under the hood, your should give Endeavour OS [0] a try. It's basically vanilla Arch with a nicely configured XFCE desktop and a graphical installer.

[0]: https://endeavouros.com/

JanMaon Reining in the thundering herd: Getting to 80% CPU utilization with Django

Interesting to read that they are using Unix sockets to send traffic to their backend processes. I know that it's easily done when using HaProxy but I have never read about people using it. I guess the fact that they are not using docker or another container runtime makes sockets rather simple to use.

JanMaon Life before smartphones (2020)

About 2.5 years ago I struggled a bit with smartphone addiction. All the screen time limitation apps didn't work out for me and I decided the smartphone had to go. Instead I bought the then newly released Nokia 8110 4G, which is a so-called featurephone. This phone really worked out well for me.

It had great battery life of up to a week, WiFi, 4G and supported Whatsapp. You could take an occasional snapshot with it's 2MP camera and if you really wanted to, browse the internet on a tiny 2.45" screen. Also you could connect it with you Google account to sync contacts and email.

With these features it allowed me to do the beneficial things you use an internet connected phone for, like staying in touch with my peers and looking for directions. But I was no longer able to mindlessly scroll the internet for hours each day because it was just not possible.

So if you're also not happy with your smartphone usage, I can really recommend you to give a featurephone a try. At ~60€ it is cheap enough to try it for 2 weeks and put it in some drawer if it doesn't work out.

Disclaimer: 1,5 years later I started using a smartphone again because I had a kid and wanted to be able to take better pictures.

[0]: https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_int/nokia-8110-4g/specs

JanMaon Designing Our Serverless Engine: From Kubernetes to Nomad, Firecracker, and Kuma

Nice post, thanks for sharing it.

From personal experience I can only agree with their choice to pick Nomad. At the place where I work we have been running Nomad as our main container orchestrator for around 2.5 years now. It's rock solid, very easy to set-up and maintain and overall not too complex to understand in depth.

JanMaon Ask HN: Good books/courses to learn networking essentials for web developers?

When it comes to networking fundamentals I can definitely recommend "Computer Networks" by Andrew Tanenbaum[0].

[0]: https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Tanenbau...

JanMaon We Don’t Use Docker

> Now imagine if only you could schedule to run systemd units using Nomad

With some tweaks to your unit files this is actually possible. Nomad has the concept of custom task drivers you can implement to make it schedule any kind of workload you like. I am maintaining a task driver which allows you to run systemd-nspawn containers with Nomad [1].

Using this task driver you can deploy your systemd units running inside a systemd-nspawn container into a Nomad cluster. If this sounds interesting to you I have written a how-to blog-post about this [2]

[1]: https://github.com/JanMa/nomad-driver-nspawn

[2]: https://janma.tk/2021-01-10/nomad-deploy-systemd-units/

JanMaon Ask HN: What did you purchase that measurably improved your quality of life?

A dishwasher.

I spent the last 7 years doing dishes by hand due to lack of space in my Appartments. Then recently I found out there are things called "countertop" dishwashers which are half the size of normal ones and fit neatly onto your washing machine.

No longer having to spend 3-4 hours every week on doing the dishes really makes a big difference for me.

JanMaon Traefik, Now With Native Go Plugins

I am really happy to finally see them adding some functionality to add custom middlewares to Traefik. However it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that in order to use it, you have to sign up to their new SaaS. Especially when keeping in mind that this is the "most requested feature" of the community.

JanMaon Tmux for Mere Mortals

If you are looking for a nice tmux config I can definitely recommend "Oh my tmux": https://github.com/gpakosz/.tmux

JanMaon Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

Definitely agree! I switched to Spacemacs about 1.5 years ago and the increase in productivity was amazing.

If you work with Git a lot, it's worth looking at for Magit alone. The way you are able to perform complex tasks with a few keystrokes is a huge timesaver for me.

JanMaon Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?

https://janma.tk/

Relatively young blog of mine. Every once in a while I try to write detailed articles about technical things I am currently interested in.

I wrote a 6 part series about porting a Unikernel to Xen: https://janma.tk/2018-11-11/os-xen-001/

More recently I started to take a deep dive into running containers with systemd-nspawn: https://janma.tk/2019-10-13/systemd-nspawn/

JanMaon Docker 19.03: Rootless Mode (Experimental)

Yes it is possible, but not using Kubernetes AFAIK. HashiCorp Nomad [1] has an LXC driver which allows you to orchestrate LXC containers.

[1]: https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/drivers/external/lxc.html