vellosa.com

Initial website creation with Hugo

Thu, 14 May 2026 09:52:00 +0200

After deciding to create another personal blog and choosing the technologies, the next step is to build the basic site.

For this I’ve been using a Debian laptop for local Hugo development. Unfortunately, the Hugo version available through the Debain package manager was quite old, so I downloaded the latest release directly from GitHub instead.

From a browser navigate to the Hugo releases page and download the latest .deb package. Then to install Hugo package, run the command (with the updated version number):

Hosting on GitLab

Thu, 14 May 2026 18:21:00 +0200

Setting up the site using GitLab Pages

Personal domain name

Fri, 15 May 2026 09:15:00 +0200

GitLab provides a stable platform for hosting the site, however, the domain name does not look profesional. Hosting on a personal domain name looks a lot better. The steps I have for this are:

Purchasing a domain through Infomaniak
Setting up a CloudFlare Proxy for the DNS name
Configuring GitLab pages
Update to the Hugo base URL config

Impressum

Thu, 14 May 2026 08:25:03 +0000

Contact details are…

Privacy

Thu, 14 May 2026 08:14:03 +0000

My intention for this site is to share information and not collect anything about users. Having said that I am using a number of thrid party services that will probably collect some data. These include:

GitLab - This Hugo site is hosted as GitLab pages on gitlab.com
CloudFlare - who are the CDN behind which this site is hosted
Google Analytics - as I wanted to understand what their services provide

These are the obvious services that are in use.

About

Thu, 14 May 2026 07:44:03 +0000

I am Ian, a software developer and agilist based in central Switzerland. This site is simple a place for me to dump my thoughts.

And we're back...

Thu, 15 May 2025 12:00:00 +0000

I’ve done this many times. But this time I mean it. Really!

Over the years I’ve tried blogging on many platforms. Early on I even built my own scripts to convert text into HTML which I pushed to an apache server. I’ve tried Apache Roller and Blogger, and about nine years ago I dipped my toes into IndieWeb, setting up a WithKnown site.

Most recently I’ve been posting internally at work using GitLab and Jekyll, This is that, but made public.

Thanks to @ollispieps and @jugch for organising a great hands-on #ContinuousDelivery workshop and @cssversicherung for sponsoring

Thu, 31 Aug 2017 19:09:14 +0000

I attended an excellent hands-on Continuous Delivery workshop.

Topics covered included:

Docker environments
Git repositories using Gogs
Jenkins CI pipelines
Gradle builds
Continuous Delivery practices

The workshop balanced practical exercises with discussions around:

Continuous Integration
Continuous Delivery
Continuous Deployment

Special thanks to CSS for providing facilities and refreshments.

Using Google Authenticator to protect sudo on Raspberry Pi

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 20:23:03 +0000

This article explains how to configure two-factor authentication for sudo on a Raspberry Pi using Google Authenticator.

Example PAM configuration:

auth required pam_google_authenticator.so user=root secret=/root/${USER}.google_authenticator

After configuration:

Enter your password
Enter the verification code from your authenticator app

Helpful references:

How-To Geek
Arch Linux Wiki

Philips Hue motion sensor: I like it, but not for the living room (yet?) @tweethue

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 04:53:13 +0000

I experimented with using a Philips Hue motion sensor in the living room.

The setup mostly worked well:

Lights dimmed automatically when watching TV
Lights dimmed further during films
Lights brightened again afterwards

However, motion detection during viewing caused the lights to return to full brightness unexpectedly.

Overall the motion sensor idea was promising, but still needed refinement for living room usage.

Why can't my @QNAP_nas play nicely with @CrashPlan?

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 20:52:58 +0000

A discussion of stability and compatibility issues between QNAP NAS devices and CrashPlan.

The article explores backup reliability frustrations and asks why QNAP and CrashPlan struggle to work together reliably.

Setting up a Raspberry Pi is surprisingly easy

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 22:30:23 +0000

Setting up a Raspberry Pi turned out to be much easier than expected.

The post walks through:

Downloading Minibian
Verifying checksums
Extracting the image
Writing the image to an SD card using dd
Booting the Raspberry Pi

Example commands:

sha1sum 2015-11-12-jessie-minibian.tar.gz
umount /dev/mmcblk0p2
dd bs=4M if=~/2015-11-12-jessie-minibian.img of=/dev/mmcblk0
sync

Once completed the SD card can be inserted into the Raspberry Pi and booted.

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 22:00:15 +0000

Years ago I installed WhatsApp on my phone. When I opened it up for the first time, I was asked if I wanted to upload my entire contact list onto their servers.

I was unsure if I should really do this, as the contact data is not mine to give away. There is no way I could choose which of the contacts I wanted to share with WhatsApp, and in the end decided I would rather just delete the application.

Guess whose back...

Fri, 04 Dec 2015 13:13:24 +0000

I am not sure what keeps drawing me back. I want to blog, start a little, then have no time for it, so give up again. So here is another attempt at setting up a @withknown server at home to see if I can keep going for more than 5 minutes.

I already appear to be having some issues with dyndns, which does not appear to propagate my address out to everyone. But that is something to work on later.