Welcome in Take Back Your Cloud

One of the items I had on my NixOS adoption checklist was enabling Secure Boot. It’s not something you get “out of the box”, so sooner or later you have to deal with it. Now that NixOS is my daily driver, some things stop being a nice to have, especially when they’re security-related. That’s why it became a priority, and why I put together a reusable, documented configuration here: https://github.com/palumbou/another_nixos_configurations_template/tree/master/nixos_configs_template/hosts/secure_boot ...

I tried Kiro. These days I was in the mood for a “cook-and-serve” project: a minimal AWS soffritto (just enough infrastructure to make it real), a pinch of AI (apparently mandatory in 2025), and no more than ~24 hours (not consecutive) to build something end-to-end inside Kiro. After the last event I organized, I got an idea: a Telegram bot that, every day, publishes into a dedicated channel the items from a list of RSS feeds-only those from the last 24 hours—then translates and summarizes them in Italian. ...

For a few months I couldn’t find the time (or the energy) to keep working on my plan to migrate to NixOS as my primary OS for personal use but, because there’s always a “but”, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this, over the last two months I finally made the jump. And it turned out to be far less painful than I expected, both on the operating system side and on the desktop stack (display manager / window manager). If you’ve never tried it, I strongly recommend giving a tiling window manager a fair shot: the learning curve is lower than it looks, and the day-to-day productivity gains are immediate once the muscle memory kicks in. ...

On May 23rd, NixOS 25.05 was officially released ( nixos.org/blog/announcements/2025/nixos-2505/), making version 24.11 deprecated. I’ve therefore updated my configuration and the template I published, creating two branches in my repository another_nixos_configurations_template: 24.11 branch containing the working template for version 24.11 25.05 branch where I’ve made the necessary changes to build with version 25.05 and where I’ll continue developing the template The master branch will be aligned with the template for the latest NixOS version, merging from the corresponding branch (so at this moment it’s a merge from the 25.05 branch). ...

Today I’m excited to share my first contribution to the NixOS project! I recently discovered and fixed an issue in the nixpkgs repository, which has now been accepted and merged into the main branch. The issue was related to the Catppuccin theme for Plymouth package. For those unfamiliar, Plymouth is the boot splash screen utility used in many Linux distributions, including NixOS, and Catppuccin is a popular pastel theme available in different variants. ...

As Queen used to sing, Another… bucket of tools instead of “one bites the dust”: I’ve published a new repository, another_bucket_of_tools. The repository will contain a collection of shell scripts developed with AI, recreating commonly available utilities with custom improvements tailored to my specific needs. These are shell scripts that can already be found on the Internet but are developed again from scratch based on my requirements, starting with the idea of not writing a single line of code myself but learning to write prompts to have the AI do it as accurately as possible and with as few queries as possible. ...

Two months later, I’ve managed to update my NixOS configuration files to incorporate the Disko “tool.” For anyone who missed my previous post: I recently came back to NixOS and spent some time studying and developing my personal configuration files, using the official manual, YouTube videos, and GitHub repos from other users as references. Seeing how useful those examples were inspired me to publish my own. I’ve structured these files to fit my needs, intentionally without using Flakes or Home Manager, to keep everything as simple as possible. Then I shared them as a “template” in my repo Another NixOS Configurations Template. ...

Returning to Linux as my daily operating system, I wanted something stable, secure, and easily replicable – allowing me to get a workstation up & running in the shortest time possible from a fresh HDD. I also needed an OS that could handle client machines in a business context, replicating the same environment except for user-specific details. If NixOS came to mind while reading, keep going. I first tried NixOS a couple of years ago, then left it for Fedora due to time constraints. Since late December, I’ve come back to it, focusing on dotfiles and configuration. I consulted the official manual, watched some YouTube videos, and examined various GitHub repos from other users – their examples inspired me to publish my own approach. ...

Hello. Many routers have an integrated “print server,” that is, the ability to connect a printer via USB and share it on the network. In case your router doesn’t have this capability, we could always use our Raspberry as a print server with Cups apt-get install cups we enable administration from the web interface cupsctl –share-printers –remote-admin –remote-printers and add our user to the “lpadmin” group usermod -a -G lpadmin our_user ...

Hello. A torrent client can always be useful (naturally only for legal purposes), so let’s proceed sudo apt-get install transmission-daemon By doing this, we’ll install a daemon (always active), to stop it sudo service transmission-daemon stop Once stopped, let’s take the opportunity to configure it sudo nano /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json where “download-dir” = full path where to save your downloads “download-limit” = number of simultaneous downloads “download-limit-enabled” = number of downloads, 1 enabled, 0 disabled ...