Syncthing: Your Own Files, on All Your Machines, With No Cloud
Continuous file sync between your own devices, encrypted in transit, with nobody's server holding a copy. Plus the Android situation, which changed in 2024 and trips up everyone arriving from…
Docker Compose: One File That Describes the Whole Thing
A compose file turns a long docker run command nobody can remember into something you can read, version and hand to someone else. Plus the version numbering that will confuse…
Caddy vs nginx: Certificates You Never Think About Again
Caddy gets you HTTPS in a two-line config file with no certbot, no cron job and no renewal to forget. That is a real saving, and there are still good…
Atuin: Shell History That Actually Remembers
Your shell history is a text file that truncates, loses concurrent sessions and cannot tell you where or when a command ran. Atuin replaces it with a database, and optionally…
What a Filesystem Journal Does During a Crash
A journal means you no longer wait an hour for fsck after a power cut. It does not mean the file you were writing survived — and understanding that gap…
Signals: How Processes Are Asked to Stop
Ctrl+C, kill, systemctl stop and a container shutting down are all the same mechanism. Knowing which signal is being sent, and who is allowed to ignore it, explains why some…
Memory, Swap and the OOM Killer
free says almost no memory is available and the machine is fine. Then one day a process disappears with no error in its own logs. Both of those make sense…
What Actually Happens When You Run a Program
You type a name and press enter. Between that and the first line of output sit fork, exec, an ELF header and a dynamic linker — and knowing the sequence…
xargs: Turning a List Into Commands (and When to Reach for parallel)
Argument list too long, and filenames with spaces in them. xargs solves the first and creates the second unless you know the one flag that matters.
openssl: The Six Commands You Actually Need
openssl has hundreds of subcommands and a manual page that assumes you already know cryptography. In practice there are six things people need, and each is one line.