Coding Archives - Reflections & Explorations

Evolving Passwords: Transitioning from Bitwarden to Apple Passwords

January 12, 2025January 12, 2025 by Vik

You can tell 2025 is shaping up to be a year of change for me—first transitioning from Quicken Desktop to Simplifi, and now moving from Bitwarden to Apple Passwords. Our family’s password management journey started over a decade ago. Back then, my wife and I used a password-protected Excel spreadsheet to store all our credentials. While rudimentary by today’s standards, …

Create an Airplay 2 Player

July 27, 2024July 27, 2024 by Vik

Our house came with outdoor speakers installed but there wasn’t a way to play music on those because there wasn’t any audio receiver connected. These are passive speakers so would require an amplifier (or full blown audio receiver) to power them. Buying a receive is an overkill so I was looking for amps. While looking for amps, wanted to get …

Plex hardware encoding with Intel Arc A380

December 6, 2024January 7, 2024 by Vik

UPDATE: The instructions in the original post were for Ubuntu 22.04. If you already have Ubuntu 24.04, you can skip all this as long as you can see your device under /dev, it should show something like /dev/renderD2128. I do recommend installing the compute packages from Intel’s repository # Install the Intel graphics GPG public key wget -qO – https://repositories.intel.com/gpu/intel-graphics.key …

Configuring NFS Share on Ubuntu

January 7, 2024January 7, 2024 by Vik

Configuring NFS is a simple but can be a frustrating experience esp. if you are trying to export an NFS root. Here’s step by step instructions that helped me. On the server where NFS is configured, path is /storage. Let’s call this server nas. This NAS runs Ubuntu. Edit the /etc/exports file on the NAS. The IP is your network …

zpool creation failing in Proxmox GUI

January 1, 2024January 1, 2024 by Vik

While trying to create a brand new zpool from Proxmox GUI, I was facing an error. This was partly solved by New SSDs not showing correct Serial# in Proxmox Disk Manager so at least in Proxmox, correct Serial#s were showing in the zpool creation screen (see below). In looking further, the by-id links are not present, and the two that …

New SSDs not showing correct Serial# in Proxmox Disk Manager

January 1, 2024January 1, 2024 by Vik

I faced a weird issue. I added 5x identical brand new consumer grade SSDs to my DL380P, and inside Proxmox disk manager, they all showed up as having Serial#s as 0s, see below. Upon looking further, it appeared that Proxmox is using ID_SERIAL from udevadm. The correct serial number is shown in ID_SCSI_SERIAL. I looked around on Proxmox forums, and …

How Ryan Tomayko explained REST to his wife

August 24, 2019October 18, 2012 by Vik

Just encountered this excellent post about Ryan Tomayko explaining REST to his wife. Give it a read. It’s here: http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife

Installing Ruby on Rails on Fedora 16

August 24, 2019April 28, 2012 by Vik

I had somewhat of a hard time setting up a machine for my Ruby on Rails experiments but fortunately I was able to set up one after banging my head on the wall several times and with the help of several internet articles. So, here’s what I did: 1. First make sure you have apache, curl, git, mysql, sqlite and node.js …