Since installing NixOS on a little Minisforum PC, I’ve been a full-time NixOS user at home (I use a MacBook Pro at work). I’m going to be finishing work next Autumn, so I will probably put some form of Linux on the MacBook at that point. However, as it is an Apple Silicon machine and it has a T-whatever-it-is security chip in it, my options may be practically limited to installing Asahi Linux rather than NixOS. I may also dual-boot with macOS for a while to keep a foot in that camp and maintain compatibility with iOS, if I am still using an iPhone then. Asahi is a heroic project, given the hurdles of trying to reverse engineer some very proprietary and locked-down hardware, but there is a limit to what they can do in terms of compatibility. I decided to buy a used PC laptop to install NixOS on, and settled on a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 9). I’ll explain why I chose this model, how the installation went, and the upgrades I made.

Those of you who read my blog regularly will know that some of my posts are rather niche. I have to warn you now that this one attains a whole new level of nichey-ness. However, in my usual spirit of ‘this is interesting to me’ and ‘writing it down helps me to remember it later’, here it is. This article might also be interesting to you if you:

• Use an external keyboard both with and without a built-in laptop keyboard;
• Write code and need accented characters occasionally or constantly;
• Use multiple operating systems (particularly macOS and Linux, but I suspect this stuff is relevant to Windows too);
• Have a ZSA keyboard;
• Use a Wayland window manager on NixOS.

Still with me? Allons-y!

We all love to start new things. It’s exciting! The creativity overfloweth! Keeping those things maintained over the longer term is harder work, and can seem boring and routine. It’s an act of resistance to keep caring for the thing you created, but the great thing is that it pays you back more and more the longer that you continue to do it. It’s also work that — in my opinion — you should do yourself, with your own hands and brain. Let me try to explain why.

We haven’t gone away on holiday for the past couple of years. It doesn’t feel fair to leave Bianca (now a grand old lady of 20) in a boarding cattery, so either only one of us can go away (the other staying at home to look after Bianca), or neither of us do. Mr. Bsag very kindly volunteered to do the cat-sitting for a couple of successive years, but it didn’t feel the same going away without him. Now that my ME/CFS is worse, it has also taken away the main thing that we went away for: taking long walks in the countryside.

I have still taken time off work of course (at the time of writing, I’m nearing the end of a period of annual leave), and that provides lots of opportunities to potter and engage in my many hobbies, so it’s not all bad. We also try to schedule in a day trip to somewhere that’s quiet and in the countryside. On this occasion it was Hidcote, a garden managed by the National Trust. It was one of the nicest ‘days out’ we’ve had in a while.

Walking in to the room was an overwhelming experience. The triage nurses in the lobby of the Accident and Emergency unit took a few brief details then asked us to check in using the iPads on the wall just around the corner. As we turned the corner, it hit us that the waiting room was absolutely full. All the seats were taken, and people leaned against the walls and in the passageways, so that they had to shift every time someone went past. It was around 23:30 on a Tuesday. At this point, we had no idea that we would still be here nine hours later.

Well, hello again! I don’t think that I have ever had a gap in posting as long as this before. Several months ago, I decided to explore moving this blog from both my previous host (Netlify), and away from the static site generator I had been using (Hugo, more on those decisions below). However, life got in the way. We sadly lost a family member, Mr. Bsag got an injury that resulted in us spending 9 hours overnight in A&E (the Emergency Room, for North Americans), I had some bad bouts of ME/CFS fatigue, and so on. In between those times, I started to chip away at the blog moving task, but I kept getting delayed by having to make decisions about a long chain of dependencies. If I moved to Host A with static site generator B, would I be able to deploy from git host Z?

You might be thinking, “but surely your old site was still working fine all this time, so nothing (apart from the ‘life’ stuff) was preventing you from posting here in the meantime?”. That would be technically correct, gentle and perceptive reader, but it does not take into account my stubborn decision to only publish any new articles once the migration was complete. I know, it makes no sense. Anyway, the bulk of the work is done now, and the remaining tweaks and improvements can wait until later. I have a few ideas for posts that have stacked up, but for now, I’ll go through the decisions behind the move and what was involved before I forget why I put myself through all this.

I’ve been doing a bit of sewing recently after a bit of a break in which I really didn’t have the energy. I still have to take it much slower than I used to do — no more non-stop sewing days — but I am finding that if I spread cutting out and sewing over several days, I can manage it.

This is actually quite nice as it forces me to take my time and pay attention to the details. In the process, I have noticed some seemingly rigid ‘Laws of Sewing’ over a few projects.

I was sitting at my desk at home, pottering on the computer, when a grey shape flickered in my peripheral vision in the garden outside. This was quickly followed by a clattering of wings and a high pitched squawk. I looked out the window and quickly spotted him standing on his prey. There, at the centre of a blast radius of feathers, a male sparrowhawk.

I’ve been doing some more NixOS pottering over this weekend, working out the details of a thorough backup strategy. Before I moved to Linux, I used (and still use) iDrive for my backups. Its reasonably priced, and has servers based in Europe, and seems to work well enough. You can also run it on Linux, but I had some trouble getting it working with NixOS. I have also used the Gnome Circle app Pika Backup, which is delightful, but that is obviously not cross-platform. It is based on Borg Backup which is cross-platform (across Linux and macOS anyway), but I struggled a bit to think how I would link everything up.

After quite a bit of reading on what might work well, I settled on Restic. This is cross-platform, has a long development history, is now quite well-established and stable, and has incremental snapshots and encryption built in. It enables backing up to a variety of remote locations natively, but can also be paired with rclone backends to enable an even wider range of possibilities. It is available as a brew on macOS, but on NixOS, you can set it up as a service for automatic backups using a systemd timer.

Happy New Year? I dearly hope it’s better than the last one for all of us, but time and reality is gradually sanding the corners off my innate and irrepressible optimism.

I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but this is how the end part of the last year was for me, and what 2026 looks like.