Tom

The Case of the Vanishing Status Bar

A YouTube video, a realtime signal, and five wrong turns before the actual bug confessed. I spent a night migrating my personal dotfiles to NixOS — sway, waybar, the works, ported into home-manager as a fully reproducible flake. Almost everything came up clean on the first real reboot. One thing

How I Made My Unraid VM Self-Heal with Discord Alerts

💡 "My Home Assistant VM paused itself randomly. One day my lights didn't turn on and I knew it had to be fixed... permanently." Running Home Assistant in a VM on Unraid is a solid approach — until the VM unexpectedly pauses and takes your smart home with

Why Trying to Make My HP Laser Printer Work Over the Network Was a Terrible Idea (and What I Learned)

Or: How I Fought a Printer and the Printer Won I just wanted to print. Simple, right? Little did I know I was about to fall into the deepest Linux rabbit hole of my life. The Setup I had a HP Laser 107a — cheap, compact, perfect for my light office

Surviving a Three-Week Arch Linux Nightmare: The Real Culprit Was RAM

For over three weeks, I found myself deep in a spiral of debugging what seemed like a catastrophic failure of my Arch Linux system. What began as a simple boot issue escalated into suspected disk failure, GPU problems, file corruption, and mysterious kernel panics. Turns out, the fix was as