kepstin

Yay!

What, you were expecting me to put something here? Well, I guess I should say hi…

I’m Calvin Walton (kepstin is my internet handle), a fan of various sorts of Linux, Photography, the programming languages C and Perl, Japanese Anime and pop music, etc. Currently employed by Blindside Networks, where I’m working on the BigBlueButton open-source project. You can find me in Ottawa, Ontario. (Canada, if you didn’t know.)

Also find me on social network pages and other sites around the internet: check out the list on my Links page.

  • Manifest Generation in Exherbo

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    In my own developer package repository, and in merge requests I have made recently to official Exherbo repositories, I have started to include Manifest files alongside the Exheres packaging. This post is an attempt to document how I have the tooling set up for semi-automatically generating manifests. The cave tool includes a cave digest subcommand…

  • Babel Routing over Wireguard for the Tubes

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    What are The Tubes? They were an experimental overlay network for doing, uh, sysadmin LARP? Some public information about the setup could be seen over at pvpn.reclaim.technology (archive link; the network is no longer running). Anyways, as the overlay network grew, we wanted to make the network more mesh-like instead of star-like. And that means…

  • The easy way to get a 3-button T450/T450s Synaptics touchpad working on a T440p in Windows

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    kepstin
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    Important: This only applies to Synaptics touchpads, not ALPS! OctoPerf’s T440p buyer’s guide includes some hints on how to tell them apart. This is a simplified version of the instructions based on Nick Heim’s blog post which goes through the process of how the registry file below was created. So, most of the instructions for…

  • Survey of terminal palettes: DIR_COLORS edition

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    A quick run through of how various GNOME terminal palettes look like with the 8-color+bold DIR_COLORS file shipped with coreutils and used by many Linux distributions. Tango is a fairly light value but low saturation palette. The light background is an odd off-white shade that reduces contrast. When the “Show bold text in bright colors”…

  • Thoughts on OpenWRT and OSTree

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    In theory, OpenWRT should work reasonably well with OSTree – it’s already designed to be run with an immutable base layer (for squashfs images). In terms of adapting OpenWRT to run on OSTree, the hardest thing I can think of would be working out how to do the bootloader on embedded devices. I don’t know…

  • Ryzen Motherboard ECC Memory Summary

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    kepstin
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    Update (2017-06-22): After looking at the poor state of ECC support for a while, I ended up picking up an MSI B350 TOMAHAWK board, which does not support ECC. A variety of factors contributed to this, not the least of which that it had PCI ports legacy hardware support. The end result? I’m no longer…

  • Blast from the Past: 2003

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    I found a backup of my old site, made in 2003 or thereabouts as best I can tell. Other than a couple dead link cleanups and removal of interactive elements (seriously, a guestbook?), it’s there almost as it was. Check it out.

  • Should you move your site to HTTPS?

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    Yes. In most cases, it’s easy – and free! Check out Let’s Encrypt.

  • Scanning CDs with CCD/LED scanners

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    So, back on my recommended scanners post, I made a note that CCD sensor scanners that use LED lighting – which at this point is basically all of them – have an issue with scanning CDs. It looks like this: This is, frankly, quite awful. It’s hard to read anything with the light pattern that…

  • Recommended Scanners for Album Art Scanning

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    Here’s a quick list of currently available scanner models that I recommend for people doing album art scanning. The Criteria I’m not covering scanning 12″ vinyl in this guide. For that, you need a large format scanner, which is a completely different price category of professional equipment – or use a camera and a glare-free…

  • 0x40 Hues of HTML5

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    Just a little heads-up: I’ve been working on an HTML5-based port of the “0x40 Hues of Megumi” flash. Please go ahead and check out 0x40 Hues of HTML5 (working title). Some features are still missing, but I hope to add them in future updates. I’m hosting the code (MIT licensed) on Github.

  • Spring 2015

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    This is the big one. The one you’ve all been waiting for. This is the hype season. (I didn’t post the stuff from last season, but, uh, I guess Parasyte, Your Lie in April, Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! all made the list, and I’m now catching up on Log Horizon.) Maximum Hype Fate/stay…