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Brendan

@brendan@social.brendans-bits.com

Interests:
- Critical Realism as a philosophy of science (used in my PhD to look at exiting homelessness)
- Tinkerer with the *BSDs for home networking
- I've spent a few years trying to use RF electronics to help measure soil moisture

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10 Posts

Joined August 14, 2025

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Brendan @brendan@social.brendans-bits.com · Jul 11, 2026

Replying to @oxy@social.bsdlab.au

@oxy@social.bsdlab.au @stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe No, that's used as the captcha.

Brendan @brendan@social.brendans-bits.com · Apr 14, 2026

Replying to @brendan@social.brendans-bits.com

To do: permanently set DISPLAY for the usercheck whether making xhost more permissive is necessary (since the chroot user has access to .Xauthority) Things that caught me out: forgetting to mount both /home AND /home/ since they are separate datasets Things that made it easier: there is an unofficial apt repository with the latest version of Zotero available; this pulled in the required dependencies #zotero #freebsd

Brendan @brendan@social.brendans-bits.com · Apr 14, 2026

RE: @brendan@social.brendans-bits.com

And success!

To run #zotero 9.0 (or any X11 app) on #freebsd:
On the host:

Ubuntu Jammy chroot
mounting /tmp, /home, AND /home/ (because my home directory is a separate ZFS dataset)
make xhost permissive (i.e. xhost +)

In the chroot:

creating a user with the same uid as my FreeBSD user
increase file descriptor limits for the user
export DISPLAY=:0.0 (as the user)
simply run zotero

Brendan @brendan@social.brendans-bits.com · Apr 14, 2026

Replying to @jaap@mastodon.bsd.cafe

@jaap@mastodon.bsd.cafe There's an actively developed project called 'Sylve' which is sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation - looks like it replicates proxmox for FreeBSD. May have some of what you're looking for. The developer, Hayzam (?) is active on the Fediverse.

Brendan @brendan@social.brendans-bits.com · Mar 17, 2026

Replying to @tamsin@toot.wales

@tamsin@toot.wales Sorry I can't help there, I'm in Australia.

Brendan @brendan@social.brendans-bits.com · Mar 16, 2026

Replying to @tamsin@toot.wales

@tamsin@toot.wales I don't know if you've already looked into this, but a small number of people with coeliac disease react to the protein (avenin) in oats. (More importantly, I hope you can find the source of the exposure, those first couple of years are stressful having to read everything with a magnifying glass and still second guessing yourself)

Brendan @brendan@social.brendans-bits.com · Mar 16, 2026

Replying to @tamsin@toot.wales

@tamsin@toot.wales Another option (because testing food is expensive) are 'gluten immunogenic peptides' or GIP test kits. These can only test retrospectively, but allow you to look back at what you have eaten / where you have been and then infer likely sources of food contamination. (I found it was a game of cat-and-mouse for the first couple of years, and A LOT of filtering out well-intentioned but uninformed misinformation)

Brendan @brendan@social.brendans-bits.com · Feb 12, 2026

Replying to @brendan@social.brendans-bits.com

@drwx@mastodon.acc.sunet.se If I read your question correctly, I would say "yeah nah... a cloned snapshot is sort of... but really isn't a thick jail" "Yeah..." because it like a thick jail in that you have resource isolation: you have a jail that isn't sharing base with another jail. Any changes to the jail built on the clone are stored separately to the snapshot. But I come down on the side of "nah" because you don't have portability: you can't simply pick up that jail and move it to another host.

Brendan @brendan@social.brendans-bits.com · Feb 12, 2026

Replying to @drwx@mastodon.acc.sunet.se

@drwx@mastodon.acc.sunet.se The way I think of 'thick' vs 'thin' is whether the jail has its own copy of root and how it is upgraded. A thick jail has a copy of the base system to itself. Any changes to the base system affect that jail only. You have to upgrade the base of each jail individually. A thin jail shares the base amongst multiple concurrent jails. Any changes to base affect all jails. You can upgrade the base of multiple jails simultaneously by upgrading the shared base.

Brendan @brendan@social.brendans-bits.com · Oct 12, 2024

Replying to @justine@mastodon.bsd.cafe

@justine@mastodon.bsd.cafe @justine@snac.smithies.me.uk big thumbs up

Brendan

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