Follow-up to Building It the Boring Way: Arch + Hyprland From Scratch — turned out easier than I thought, once I got past one annoying snag right at the start.

The only real hiccup was WiFi from the Arch install ISO — iwctl didn’t want to cooperate at first, so getting the installer online took longer than every other step combined. Once that was sorted, the rest of the plan went pretty much exactly as laid out: archinstall for the base system, then Hyprland and the usual Wayland bits on top.

Follow-up to The Politics I Never Noticed Were There — this one’s the practical half. After all the reading about Omarchy’s baggage, I landed on the least dramatic option available: a plain Arch install, built up by hand, with someone else’s dotfiles layered on top rather than baked in.

The machine is an old Lenovo laptop that’s been kicking around doing not much — Intel i5-4300M, 16GB RAM, and (crucially) an SSD I fitted before starting, which turned out to remove basically every hardware worry from the list. I’m laying down LinuxBeginnings/Hyprland-Dots — the community-maintained continuation of the well-regarded JaKooLit dotfiles, handed off cleanly in early 2026 — via its companion installer, LinuxBeginnings/Arch-Hyprland.

This follows on from my post about the Omarchy/DHH controversy — I went down a much longer rabbit hole than I expected.

I went looking for a Linux distro. I came back with a headache and a much longer reading list.

It started simply enough. I’d been eyeing my old Lenovo laptop — an i5-4300M, 16GB RAM, nothing special — as a candidate for a proper Arch + Hyprland setup. Omarchy kept coming up: slick, popular, well-documented, built by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the guy behind Ruby on Rails. Obvious choice, right?

A few people on Mastodon pointed me at something about Omarchy I’d completely missed: real controversy around its creator, DHH, and his views.

This is a follow-up to my previous post on Omarchy. If you haven’t seen the background, this article lays it out well: The Ruby community has a DHH problem.

I’ll be honest, this had totally bypassed me. I was looking at Omarchy purely through the lens of “is this a good tiling window manager setup,” and hadn’t clocked the wider context around the person behind it. That’s on me, and it’s a decent reminder that it’s worth stepping outside our news bubbles every so often and looking at the bigger picture, not just the interesting tech side of something.

I’ll admit it: I have a problem. Every time a second-hand or refurbished machine turns up cheap, I find a reason to buy it. The result is a small fleet of computers accumulating around the house, most of which I didn’t strictly need.

It’s not really about the hardware itself, though. It’s an enjoyable side hobby — each new (old) machine is an excuse to play around with a different operating system, distro, or desktop environment without any risk to the computer I actually rely on day to day. Recently that meant putting Omarchy Linux on an old laptop just to see how it held up.

I had an old laptop sitting around doing nothing, so instead of letting it gather dust I decided to put Omarchy on it and see how it held up.

Omarchy is DHH’s opinionated Arch Linux + Hyprland setup — essentially Arch with all the tedious post-install decisions already made for you: a tiling window manager, a curated set of themes, and a sensible default toolset out of the box rather than a blank Arch install you have to build up from scratch yourself.

Nearing the time for Advent of Code 2024 thinking of using Node NPM again this year.

Hopefully will complete more this year than before.

https://github.com/alastairhm/adventofcode

Learning Node JS

I’ve started playing about with Node JS to learn it enough to modify some legacy Lambda code.

One of the tasks I set myself was to write a Joke bot for Mastodon, which work out to be fairly easy with a couple of packages got and masto.

Dad Joke Bot the code is only 32 lines long, looking to expand it to be able to post images as well.

Icecream Debug

Do you ever use print() or log() to debug your code? Of course you do. IceCream, or ic for short, makes print debugging a little sweeter.

ic() is like print(), but better.

https://github.com/gruns/icecream

I got a cheap SPI TFT ST7735 Display module with SD Card reader off ebay, it had an unusual number of pins on the back.

It took a while searching about on the internet and some head scratching to find a library and work out what connected to what on the Pico.

This is what I found, and worked out.

Using that information I was able to put together this library based on a few others I found and a few test programs.