I installed Orca, an open-source IDE for running AI coding agents in parallel, on Debian entirely from the terminal — then turned off its Yolo mode, built a sandbox repo, and walked the git worktree cycle by hand before letting an agent near it.
I set out to install Goose, the open-source AI agent, by following the official docs. Three times the instructions didn’t
match what my terminal actually did. Here’s what went wrong, how I worked around each one, and why “read the error, not just the docs” saved the day.
I finally sent my first request to Inception's Mercury 3 API. Along the way I lost a key, saved a shell command instead of a secret, hit a 401, and learned how to store API keys safely on Linux.
"In Fortran, God is real unless declared INTEGER." A late-night programmer joke led me into Fortran's implicit typing, the legendary DO10I bug, and a hands-on Debian lab where Python silently returned 0 instead of 60, and flake8 caught my typo twice.
Last month’s Tumbleweed post ended with a warning: Mesa was split between Packman and openSUSE, the same setup that broke VLC. Three weeks later, it bit. Here’s how one zypper command moved eight Mesa packages to a single vendor, how a 911-package upgrade went through cleanly, and how a Packman codec package slipped in through the back door anyway.
A yellow "Couldn't start for Cowork and Code sessions" pop-up sent me through a night of log reading. The real culprit was memory pressure, not SQLcl. Along the way I found Unsloth Studio listening on my whole network, and locked it down.
Phase 3 of my Quartz notes site: I deleted six workflows that never ran, wrote a hardened GitHub Pages deploy with pinned actions, verified my domain against subdomain takeover, found a wildcard DNS record, and proved the privacy filter works on the live site.
Purpose On October 9, 2026, cleaning up an accidental SELinux install turned into a full security check of two machines. The goal was to leave both safer than they started, and to get the travel laptop ready for my Spain…
I turned on SELinux on my main Debian desktop, sat through a full-disk relabel I thought was formatting my drive, then rolled it back. Here's what SELinux is, what AppArmor is, how they differ, and the disabled AppArmor service I found on the way out.
A running, dated log of changes to my Debian setup: what I changed, why I changed it, and how to undo it. It started after two “mysteries” turned out to be my own forgotten settings.