TL;DR macOS expects 200 MB EFI System partition in the beginning of a hard drive, don’t like unformatted partitions and creates 128 MB Apple boot partitions after each real partition whenever you format it. I needed to partition an external hard drive to be usable on macOS (for Time Machine backups). I’ve partitioned the drive using GPT scheme and created one unformatted Apple HFS/HFS+ partition on Arch Linux using fdisk. It was not recognized (the inserted disk is not readable dialogue), nor was I able to format the partition (with “Media kit reports not enough space on device” error) which was shown as full in the Disk Utility.

A colleague asked me on Twitter what the problems do I have with the way WhatsApp tunnels all the messages though my phone: @raindev_: I’m tired of WhatsApp tunneling all the messages through my phone. Time to look for an alternative? @JensRantil: Also, what part about the tunneling do you find annoying? Very rarely don’t I have my phone on same Wi-Fi as computer. The answer turned out to be too long for Twitter so I decided to write a short post.

Part 2: Getting Work Done from Console This is the second part of the series of articles (part 1, part 3) about setting up Arch Linux on my MacBook. The main goal of this part is to make the installation actually useful to do some work. In some sense, I want to bootstrap the series to be able to work on the posts under Linux. Disclaimer: I won’t get to setting up graphical environment in this part; while it’s possible to do everything from this article after installing a graphical environment, I’ve decided to try how far can I get without one.

(written on December 23, 2016) After trying almost (hello, org-mode) all digital solutions for organizing my life out there and spending hundreds of dollars and countless hours worth of time I’ve bought myself a paper notebook. And I’m happy that I did. I used to be a firm proponent of keeping one’s life digital as much as possible so it may sound like a strange decision. And indeed it is. Not that I’ve never used a paper notebook before.

Part 1: Base System This is the first part of a series of articles (part 2, part 3) on how I set up dual boot Arch Linux on my Mid 2014 MacBook Pro. At the end of this part I’ll have a bootable but completely minimal installation of Arch on an encrypted partition without any tuning. Ability to boot to Mac OS will be preserved.-1-1 Updates December 11, 2016: clarify how to customize list of installed base package; add instructions how to start wired network automatically; describe a separate /data partition.

Or Why I’m Leaving Google’s Services Recently there was a lot of talk about Google services on Hacker News. Concerns people have about loosing control over their data prompted me to check out how I use Google. There’re a few reasons to worry: loosing your data, giving to much personal information to one company and having someone (or something) reading (or scanning) your private stuff. While I tried to limit my use of Google’s services in the past and moved off the major ones like Gmail, Calendar, Contacts there’s still a lot of my stuff on Google’s servers.

If you’ll have a look on timeline of this blog of mine it will be obvious that I’m dealing with writer’s block. I always wanted to have real blog, to do git push to publish, to build it from scratch myself. And about 9 month ago I got it. I found Hakyll which felt awesome, like assembling a model airplane from parts. I’ve refined it over couple of weeks and got what I wanted to have.

(written on December 12, 2015) Why I use space as my Vim leader key One of the best Vim productivity boosts is to configure your leader key. What leader key does - it gives you a namespace for custom mappings. No default Vim mappings use leader key, so you’re free to choose whatever shortcuts you like without worrying about conflicts with some predefined mappings. Considering this it makes sense to define custom mappings using leader key.