I have written before how to support tabs and scrollback in XTerm with tmux.

Now it seems like Wayland is replacing X11 as the default window system in Linux desktops. And XTerm, as the name implies, only supports X11. So I wanted to replace XTerm with another terminal with native Wayland support.

After trying a few options, I decided to go with Alacritty. As a bonus, you also get clickable hyperlinks (OSC 8).

Here is how I configured it to work with tmux:

I wrote earlier about how to backup a small SQLite database.

That solution works well for small databases, but can become impractical for larger databases. In particular if the machine with the database has not enough disk space for another copy of it, and you want to backup to another machine.

One option is to use sqlite3_rsync, but I could not get that to work, it kept running out of memory. So I found another way, dump the database to text and gzip it. Combined with ssh, you can make a backup to a remote machine without storing anything extra on disk on the database machine. Run this on the machine where you want to have the backup:

I want an easy way to run one or more ephermal Linux VMs in Ubuntu desktop, including the possibility to mount host directories into them in an efficient fashion. Those VMs should have the same CPU architecture and hardware features as the host, no need to emulate some foreign CPU or special hardware, and no GUI in the VMs. The intended use case is sandboxing and isolation for security and reproducability reason. To be used as a cheaper alternative to a remote cloud instance. Or as a more secure alternative to Docker/Podman containers, with possibility to install Docker or Podman in the VM, and run containers there without affecting the host or other VMs (it’s not feasible to nest containers in a secure manner without a proper VM).