Melroys Blog

Starship Prompt

25 December, 202111 January, 2022 Melroy van den Berg

I would like to share a nice ‘secret’. I want to introduce you to the Starship prompt! This is a getting started guide for Starship. I’m using Starship every day. Starship Prompt, not to be confused with the Starship from SpaceX 😆 , is a cross-shell prompt written in Rust. The prompt works in any common shell you may already use under GNU/Linux, like Bash. In fact, Starship prompt works under any shell under any operating system. Why? Why would you want to use Starship prompt in the first place?…

GitLab: Pull from remote repo

15 December, 202126 December, 2021 Melroy van den Berg

GitLab is an awesome product. I’m using GitLab Community Edition (Foss) at home on a daily basis. However, I need a specific feature in GitLab called Pull from a remote repository which is officially a premium feature. Too bad this feature is not free. Since this feature allows you to keep for example your forked repository in sync with a remote upstream repository. However, I created a solution without the need of a premium license. I will share the solution in this article, so you can have this premium feature…

Arguments against Bitcoin

29 September, 202118 November, 2021 Melroy van den Berg

Introduction I hear a lot of people talking bad about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. As if crypto is bad for humanity. In 2014 I already wrote a blog article about Bitcoin; Bitcoin and Litecoin (Dutch). I want to discuss several arguments against Bitcoin and misconceptions people are telling me regarding crypto. Specifically against Bitcoin. Did you know? If you bought Bitcoin in 2014, you could get 1 whole BTC for around €500 ($580). That single bitcoin is now worth around € 35.000 / $40.000. Bitcoin was briefly €50.000 during the all-time…

New server: Install & configuration of services (Part III)

16 January, 202116 January, 2021 Melroy van den Berg

Welcome back, this will be the 3rd part of new server series. In the previous parts I assembled the server and prepared the machine with Ubuntu Server. I configured the basics things like; networking, RAID setup, E-Mail and more. In case you missed that: Read Part I and Part II. Today, we will finish the job with installing and configuring all the services we love so much. Again, I included a Table of Contents for convenience reasons, since it quite a long article. But hopefully the table will help you…

New server: Setup Linux (Part II)

5 January, 202117 January, 2021 Melroy van den Berg

Happy new year everyone! 😎 Let’s install Ubuntu Server 20.04 as part of the blog series. And continue with setting-up the software part of the server. Did you miss Part I? – read that first.

New Server: Buy & Assemble (Part I)

20 December, 20205 January, 2021 Melroy van den Berg

My current server is 15 years old, and time for an upgrade! Finally! After all, adding additional memory is not good enough and we hitting the limits of the old hardware. We will replace the whole server from the ground-up.

GPT-3 – We are doomed

30 October, 20204 November, 2020 Melroy van den Berg

I would like to talk about artificial intelligence (AI), GPT-3 to be specific. Has been a while since I posted an article, but I noticed an urge to write about GPT-3 🙂 . Without further ado, let’s get into what is GPT-3. And why this is such an important topic to discuss.

Bests electric cars for your money

4 March, 20203 July, 2020 Melroy van den Berg

Currently, I’m also searching for an electric car. Of course when you are buying a car for yourself, you are judging your bare minimal requirements. Like what is the minimum range (for electric cars), the type of car or what is your budget you want to spend on a car. Aside from all those factors, those cars were hitting the marked and I couldn’t choose any more. The cars have huge differences in both range and starting price. This gave me the idea to come up with some similar calculation…

Air quality meter

28 May, 201928 May, 2019 Melroy van den Berg

Lately, I moved buildings for my work towards a building which is very close by Eindhoven Airport. Only 430 meters to be precise. The air-planes and kerosene smell triggered me about the health risks, and air quality inside the building as well as at home. The fact is that we have more and more cars/trucks within the residential areas (too bad still running on fossil fuel). Meaning our health is at risk, and apparently nobody cares. My idea was measuring is knowing, so lets start measuring! Bills of Material I…

Get the most out of your network

30 October, 2018 Melroy van den Berg

Lately I moved to my new home. My idea was to setup a good stable and high performance LAN network within my home. This project sounds pretty easy at first, but it was harder than I initially suspected it to be. In this article I talk about my goals for this project. The list of materials to get you started and creating your own network. I will talk about some useful unix tools for network analysis. How-to setup your own NFS (Network File System) server. Last but not least, I…