Kevin C. Coram

Reclaiming my corner of the Internet

About This Site

I started this site about a year ago to be my IndieWeb presence on the Internet, in lieu of relying on more mainstream offerings. I don't post updates nearly as often as I think I should, but that's okay.

I still maintain a LinkedIn Profile for professional discoverability, but any content that I might share there starts here on my personal site. POSSE - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - is an excellent philosophy.

For more interactive “social media”, I have a presense in the Mastodon Fediverse @kcoram@librem.one.

What's New?

First Warhammer 4k Models

Published on – 200 Words

I have long been curious about the Warhammer games, but I never really looked into the hobby until recently. The local comics and games store has a whole rack devoted to Warhammer: Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000, and were only too happy to discuss the hobby and why they find it so enjoyable. I ended up picking up the Getting Started With Warhammer 40,000 magazine there, which comes with a couple of models.

Election results should not be taken as a mandate

Published on – 600 Words

I have refrained from writing any articles about current events for quite some time. I don't really intend for this blog to be a forum for political discourse; I would much prefer to think and write about technical matters. Still, events are happing and the outcomes are likely to affect me and mine for some time to come.

Home Lab Updates

Published on – 500 Words

At first, installing ArchLinux or Manjaro into a libvirt VM was looking to be difficult. The virt-install program only supports adding the extra kernal arguments that would enable a tty console when also run with the --location argument. Neither ArchLinux nor Manjaro provide a location that virt-install understands. Rather, both provide an ISO image to boot from. With no console to attach to, I thought I was not going to be able to proceed.

vagrant-libvirt and Bridged Networking

Published on – 600 Words

Once I had a way to install virtual machines on my Ubuntu home lab server, my next goal was to be able to directly SSH into them from my laptop. By default, the Vagrant-installed libvirt virtual machines all connect to a virtual subnet. In order to be able to connect from other computers in my home, I needed to set up Bridged Networking. Updating Netplan Configuration In order to set up Bridged Networking, I first had to update how my server configures its network.

Trying out ArchLinux using libvirt and Vagrant

Published on – 700 Words

I have been curious about the ArchLinux distribution for some time. I have a Ubuntu 20.04 server running in headless mode in my home lab, with KVM + libvirt already set up, so I decided to set up a virtual machine to give Arch a try. I spent a fair amount of time researching how best to use libvirt to create a new VM, but almost all of the tutorials and how-tos that I found assumed access to an X desktop, either with virt-manager or with some sort of graphics driver given to virt-install.

Nest Micropub - First Steps

Published on – 700 Words

Now and then I feel like it would be convenient to be able to post quick notes, or to quickly save bookmarks, here on my blog. The obvious IndieWeb solution would be to add Micropub support. Since I have a desire to learn more about the NestJS framework for creating NodeJS servers, it seems like creating a Micropub server using NestJS will be a nice personal project. My first step was to get a better handle on creating a NestJS application, particularly using the Nx tool set that I have come to greatly appreciate at work.

Adding OAuth Authentication - Addendum

Published on – 300 Words

In my Adding OAuth Authentication to an Nginx Website article yesterday, I forgot to include one additional configuration setting that I needed to get Vouch to fully work. With the default example Gitea configuration, I found that I was still getting Unauthorized errors. I had to watch the network calls to get access to the full error message. The problem was that even though I was authenticated, I was not actually authorized.

Adding OAuth Authentication to an Nginx Website

Published on – 800 Words

A project that I hope to get started on in the near future is working on creating a micropub end-point for my blog. There are some good open source starting points, but one of my goals is to use the project as a way to better learn server-side Node.js and/or Nest.js programming. Obviously, I will want a good authentication mechanism in place to protect against abuse of the micropub end-point, once I have one.

Windows Search Down - Update

Published on – 200 Words

According to a Slashdot article that I just read, the problems with Windows Search have been resolved, with no need for everyone to edit their registries. The problem was, in fact, Bing. For reasons only known to Microsoft, the Windows Search functionality apparently uses the Bing backend – even for doing local searches. There was a service outage today, which caused the frustrating black screen to appear. I still think it is pretty inexcusable.

Windows Search Down?

Published on – 100 Words

Windows Search down for many — here's the fix TL;DR: The issue is reportedly related to Bing, and the “fix” being suggested involves using RegEdit to disable Bing integration. Not for the faint of heart! It's also pretty inexcusable . . .