I’m trying to work outside my home office more, but all my email is hosted on my home server. While disconnecting is nice, not having access when I need it has sucked.

Enter yggdrasil!

After installing on my laptop (MacOS) and my desktop (Ubuntu) I updated .ssh/config with my desktop’s IPv6 address and was able to SSH via IPv6 over my local network. Perfect!

Step two: install on a server with a public IP. One more service running on my Digital Ocean instance.

I’m not interested, at the moment, with joining the full yggdrasil network, so I configured my public instance to only allow peering from my laptop and desktop’s public keys:

  AllowedPublicKeys: [
    "desktop-public-key"
    "laptop-public-key"
  ]

On the public server, I listen via TLS rather than plain TCP. It’s slightly slower, but also slightly more secure. Since I’m not moving a lot of traffic over the connection, the extra security is worth it to me:

  Listen: [
                  tls://PUBLIC-IP-ADDRESS:56603
  ]

I couldn’t find a recommended port to listen on, so I picked a random number. 🤣

(The only “gotcha” was remembering to open the firewall for yggdrasil.)

Ramces Red’s article about yggdrasil has more information about installing and configuring a basic VPN.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to redo my Neovim configuration and lean into Lua. The goal was to optimize startup performance and improve usability.

Follow along with my neovim dotfiles repo

For years, I used Plug to manage my vim plugins, but after seeing TJ DeVries experiment with lazy.nvim, I decided to go all in!

By far, the biggest challenge was learning Lua 5.1. All the scripting languages I’ve used in the past (Ruby, Perl, Python) emphasize a “batteries included” approach. Lua, in contrast, felt like I had to assemble everything from tiny parts.

Once I got past the Lua hurdle, the rest of the conversion was straightforward. Most of the time I could swap out Vimscript with neovim Lua API methods via a regexp.

I’m pleased with the results. Startup time is faster, there are fewer weird bugs, and I understand all the configurations.

Max Gorin posted You’re using function keys wrong where he describes using function keys as a quick launcher!

So, here’s the trick: assign each of your top-12 most used apps to an F-key.

Max uses KeyboardMaestro to show/hide the apps, but we can do the same with Raycast (which I already use, and it’s free.)

Step 1

I have a 2019 MacBook Pro with Touchbar so the first change is to always display the function keys.

Within System Settings/Keyboard and Touch Bar Settings change:

• Touch Bar Shows to “F1, F2, etc. Keys”
• Press and hold fn key to “Show Expanded Control Strip”

Step 2

Install Raycast

Step 3

Open Raycast (I use ⌘Space), find the application you want to assign to a function key, and go into application configuration (using ⌘⇧,)

Hit Record Hotkey and assign it to whatever Fn you want!

For example:

• F1 Kitty Terminal
• F2 Slack
• F3 Messages
• F4 Firefox
• F5 Drafts
• F9 Music