§Posts

Blog & devlog.

An Old Admin Cheat Sheet vs. Windows 11 — Part 1: The Run Box Still Wins

I found a cmd cheat sheet I mailed myself in the Windows XP era and tested every line against Windows 11 in 2026. Roughly three quarters still work — and with the Control Panel half-migrated into Settings for a decade now, the ancient .cpl shortcuts are often the fastest path, not the nostalgic one.

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An Old Admin Cheat Sheet vs. Windows 11 — Part 2: Consoles, RSAT, and the Commands That Fix Things

The .msc consoles aged almost perfectly, the AD tools now live in RSAT optional features — and the modern half of the toolbox my old sheet never knew: DISM before SFC, netsh triage, dsregcmd, winget, a real sudo, plus a formal obituary for wmic, which Windows 11 is deleting for good.

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Fable 5 Is Back — and the Clock Runs Until July 7

Anthropic's Mythos-class flagship returned today after a three-week outage, and until July 7 subscribers can spend up to half their weekly usage limit on it. What Fable 5 actually is, why the launch was so strange, and how I plan to burn my half a tank.

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From a PEM to a Running Stack — Part 1: Why My Certificate Just Wouldn't Fit

What started as a quick certificate swap for a Dockerized ERP stack turned into a full day of discovery — because "certificate" turns out to mean half a dozen different things that all look identical.

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From a PEM to a Running Stack — Part 2: The Keystore Java Refused to Read

Building a PKCS#12 truststore for Keycloak looked straightforward until Java reported zero entries — a subtle OpenSSL quirk with aliases meant a technically valid file was completely invisible to the JVM.

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From a PEM to a Running Stack — Part 3: Three Passwords, Two Directories, One Mistaken Certificate

The certificates were technically correct, yet nothing would start — this part is about the configuration errors that are hardest to find precisely because everything looks right on the surface.

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From a PEM to a Running Stack — Part 4: When One Service Must Trust Two Worlds

Certificates were clean, passwords unified, paths correct — yet one service still refused to start, and the reason was not a mistake in the files but a fundamental misunderstanding of how Java's trust architecture actually works.

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Renting AI vs Owning It: My First Local LLM on an RTX 4070 Ti Super

For weeks my relationship with AI was “rented”: log in, send a prompt to a distant data center, wait for the answer to cross the ocean. Convenient, but missing one thing — autonomy. So I loaded a 26-billion-parameter model onto my own RTX 4070 Ti Super and watched it answer on my own electricity. Here is what I learned about VRAM, quantization, and the quiet freedom of the edge.

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The Space That Wasn’t There: Upgrading Fedora in the Dark

A full Fedora 43 → 44 release upgrade on the only laptop I own — load-bearing “orphans,” a missing space that broke chrony, a clock pinned to a router that wasn’t there, and an upgrade committed in the dark. It landed clean.

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The Volume Keys That Worked All Along: A Sway Debugging Whodunit

My volume keys stopped working on Sway — both the chassis rocker and the Fn keys. The keys were innocent; two audio servers were fighting over the speakers. A debugging whodunit, plus an on-screen volume bar.

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From a Black Screen to a Home: Making Sway Work on My Dell XPS 13

I switched from i3 to Sway on my Dell XPS 13, logged in, and was greeted by a black screen and a lonely mouse cursor. Here is how that void turned into a desktop I actually love using.

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The Azure Host: An Ottoman Ultramarines Army (Part 2)

A satisfied Saturday: I built and primed an Ottoman-themed Ultramarines army. No paint yet — here is the plan for what comes next.

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Golden Age of Cinema No One Asked For — Ep. 1: Sensiz Yaşayamam

A podcast about Turkish Yeşilçam cinema no one asked for. Ep. 1: Sensiz Yaşayamam (1977) — Metin Erksan's final film, a terminally ill woman, a hired killer, and late Yeşilçam's strangest love story.

Warhammer 40,000 — Finally.

After decades of walking past game store windows, I finally bought a Warhammer 40k starter set. Going to paint it, play one serious game against a real nerd, and probably lose. Updates incoming.

Heidelberg Xylophon Street Musician

A short clip from Heidelberg. It is very loud!