This guide is mostly a reference for myself as it’s a workflow that I find myself following whenever I set up a new Linux machine. I’m sharing it here as I’m sure many will find this useful, and it will save me from looking up each distinct step in the future.

I also took the opportunity to add some bonus network configuration tips to get the most out of the setup.

I recently installed Fedora on my personal laptop to replace Manjaro as I found Manjaro to be a just a little too flaky for my liking and I know Fedora to be a solid alternative. During installation I was asked if I wanted to encrypt my drives. Now I’m not harbouring anything particularly sensitive but I thought it was worth doing, security first and all that; after all, we expect every website to support HTTPS these days so why not?

Well there is the matter of that mildly pesky login prompt on every boot…

Fluxor is a Flux implementation for Blazor in the vein of Redux. It is a state management system designed for larger software systems that encourages immutability of state, pure functions and clean separation of code. Given my fairly basic understanding of the Flux pattern I thought it would be valuable to document what it is at a high level and what’s required when using Fluxor to implement the various concepts.

MVVM is a development pattern that has been around for a while now. It was designed to facilitate the development of WPF applications for Windows and is still used for the likes of Maui apps. I reckon it has a place in Blazor apps as a neat way to separate view from logic, and as a sort of volatile state management for when you don’t want state to persist between pages.

A published Blazor WebAssembly instance is just a collection of files that can be loaded into a browser. If these files are hosted on the API, running the API means the UI is running as well, probably from the same address. In this case it’s a little different to debug compared to launching it standalone, but not any more complicated.

I never noticed it growing up but I see it now, TOS is profoundly flakey. My ST has a TOS 1.62 ROM built in and it does not play nice with hard drives.

There’s a simple solution to this, use the wonderful open source EmuTOS instead. Now I’m not resourceful enough to go writing EmuTOS to a flash ROM but my ST does have enough RAM that I can easily get away with loading it up from the hard drive.

I couldn’t find a single-page cheat sheet that summarised SOLID software development principles, so I made one. For each of the letters in SOLID (Single Responsibility, Open/Closed, Liskov Substitution, Interface Segregation, Dependency Inversion) there are a couple of bullet points explaining the benefits of adopting them and the smells that betray their violation.

Today I spent a bit of time fighting with certificates in an ASP.NET application I’m working on. The scenario is we have Blazor Server communicating with a Minimal API. Debugging locally I was struggling to get the two to communicate, with errors like:

The remote certificate is invalid because of errors in the certificate chain: UntrustedRoot

A quick tip here for when a bluetooth mouse takes a moment to react after not being used for a few seconds. Bluetooth autosuspend can be disabled with a negligible power consumption penalty by setting a kernel parameter on boot.

I’ll talk more about why I think the Godot game engine is a good alternative to Unity as part of my alternatives series of posts, but for now I want to share for posterity’s sake how to use SQLite.NET in Godot. Skip to the end to add the one package necessary to get SQLite.NET working in Godot. For the uninitiated, SQLite.NET is an ORM for SQLite, similar to Entity Framework. SQLite is a good fit for games and I’m fond of using an ORM where possible.