Blogging on the Fediverse with ActivityPub

Previously, if you wanted to subscribe to changes from this blog, you’d have to subscribe to the RSS feed, but as of today you can also subscribe to it in your preferred Fediverse client, like Mastodon. Note this is considered Beta quality. If you have any issues, let me know.

What is the Fediverse? It’s a protocol for federated (meaning many independently operated) social networks, kind of like email. Under the hood, it uses a protocol called ActivityPub to define the interactions between different servers.

There’s a number of big implementations of this, like Mastodon, that I could have used. However, I wanted to see if it was possible to integrate directly into my static website generator, Hugo and generate all the content directly out of the posts I already write without having to maintain another program and expose another domain name for people to remember (e.g. blog@mastodon.technowizardry.net.)

This post walks through the work I did to make this work.

I like the idea of Nix, but don't enjoy using it

I’ve been playing with Nix and NixOS a lot more lately. I installed NixOS on one of my servers, I installed the Nix CLI on my laptop, I tried to use Nix to build a Docker image, I use Nix flakes.

This post was written from the perspective of a person new to Nix, but experienced with other computer languages. Thus, it’s probable that I might be doing something wrong or maybe complaining about something that’s obvious to you. However, these are issues that others may face.

It was also written over several months as I gathered issues, so even looking back, I see mistakes.

Proxy ARP is broken on Unifi U7 Lite

For several years, I had 2x Unifi U6 Lite Access Points and they worked great. I had a special Wi-Fi network for my phones and laptops with a number of settings enabled but then I upgrade to the U7 Lite and immediately started having issues where my phone would disconnect. I got frustrated enough to break out my handy tool box to figure what was going wrong.