mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Technical Storyteller | Linux & Open Source Advocate | Product Marketing | Educator | Host of The IT Guy Show | Former Red Hat, GitLab
New IT Guy Show is live, and this one is about a tool a lot of us LOVE: @bitwarden@fosstodon.org .
Password managers are one of those things everyone agrees you should use and nobody really wants to talk about. We got into why Bitwarden being open source actually matters, new features, and how it holds up when you take it into a team or an org instead of just your personal logins.
Watch here: https://youtu.be/mtJVzPL9-fQ
#Bitwarden #OpenSource #Cybersecurity #PasswordManager #Linux #ITGuyShow
The four stages of running #Linux:
It doesn't work.
It doesn't work and I have no idea why.
It works and I have no idea why.
It doesn't work again.
Happy Monday.
How I've been unwinding after work lately: losing, slowly and completely, in RimWorld.
For the uninitiated, it's a colony sim where you manage a handful of people trying to survive on a hostile planet. Things go fine for about an hour. Then a raid, a heat wave, and a random infection all show up the same afternoon.
Nine out of ten. Would lose again.
What are you playing lately? Always looking for the next thing to fail at.
#Gaming #RimWorld #PCGaming #WeekendPlans
#TechTipThursday: the Linux trick that saves you from retyping the whole command.
You run something, the terminal says permission denied, and you realize you forgot sudo. Instead of pressing up and cursoring all the way to the front of the line, just type:
sudo !!
The double bang means "the last command I ran," so this reruns it with sudo in front. Small thing, but you'll reach for it constantly.
Spent a while nodding along to Model Context Protocol like I knew what it meant. Then I actually sat down and figured it out:
Turns out it's something sysadmins are going to be weirdly good at, because it's the same job we've always done: build a system, expose it safely, hand over exactly the access needed and nothing more.
Take a look:
https://itguyeric.com/blog/what-is-mcp-for-sysadmins/
#MCP #SysAdmin #Linux #AI #OpenSource
Me: I'll just quickly check one thing in the config file.
Also Me, 3 hours later: I have rewritten the entire system from scratch and I'm not sure what timezone I'm in.
#linux #sysadmin #memeMonday
Networking on Linux isn't magic. It just looks that way until you know where to look!
Check your network interfaces: ip addr show
Test connectivity: ping -c 4 google.com
Check your routing table: ip route show
Good news for Fedora fans:
The @fedora@fosstodon.org Podcast is coming back. New episode drops April 7th. Excited to see the conversations around the Fedora community spin up again.
Not every marketing problem needs a full time hire.
Maybe you've got a launch coming and no one to own the messaging. Maybe your docs are solid but your positioning is a mess. Maybe you need someone who can actually talk to your engineers and your customers and translate between the two.
That's the kind of work I love, and you don't need the budget for a full time role to bring me in on it!
https://itguyeric.com
#ProductMarketing #DevRel #OpenSource #Freelance #Marketing
Bit of fun news to close out the week: I'll be on the RADIO Monday!
Joining Noah Chelliah on Critical Thought over on News Radio 1310 KNOX, talking passwords, open source, and probably whatever tangents we wander into. I'll be on around 10AM Central!
You can catch the stream here: https://knoxradio.com/critical-thought/
Should be a good time!
Stepping away from the homelab today. The blinking lights can wait, because I'm getting ready to run Savage Worlds tonight.
There's something about sitting around a table with dice and paper and friends that nothing on a screen quite matches. No uptime to babysit, no logs to read, no updates pending. Just a story we make up as we go.
Curious how everyone else unplugs. What's your no tech or low tech hobby you're putting some time into this weekend?
New Fedora Podcast episode!! 🎙️
What does bootc actually look like when it's running in production? James Harmison joins us to talk about building custom bootc images across wildly different contexts: NVIDIA drivers, AGX Orin hardware, replacing RHCOS in OpenShift, and even a couch gaming rig.
Real world. Real use cases. No lab bubbles.
🎧 podcast.fedoraproject.org
#Fedora #Linux #bootc #OpenSource #Containers #OpenShift
Looking for guests for the Fedora Podcast!
If you're building something interesting in the Fedora ecosystem, contributing to the project, or doing something cool with open source that the community should know about — I want to talk to you.
Drop a comment, send me a message, or tag someone who should be on.
🎙️ podcast.fedoraproject.org
#Fedora #Linux #OpenSource #Community #Podcast
Quick cron reminder on this #TechTipThursday
*/5 * * * *
Runs every 5 minutes.
But remember: cron doesn’t care if the previous job finished. Long-running jobs can pile up fast. Sometimes a systemd timer is the better tool.
One of the smallest changes that made the biggest difference in my workday: scheduling Do Not Disturb. Not turning it on when I remember. Actually scheduling it.
Deep work hours in the morning. Lunch. After 6pm. Blocked and protected. Notifications will always be there when you're ready for them. Your focus window won't.
What hours do you guard the most?
The most underrated productivity system:
- A short task list (3 things max)
- One distraction-free hour in the morning
- Knowing when to stop for the day
No app required.
#productivity
Hot take: AI killed the art of blog writing.
Not because AI writes bad content (okay maybe alittle), but because it writes enough content that nobody needs to stop and read yours.
We're drowning in posts that are technically correct but completely forgettable.
Did Real voices moved to newsletters, podcasts, and threads? Am I wrong? Where are you actually reading long-form content these days?
The disk is full.
You delete the logs.
The disk is still full.
You delete more logs.
The disk is still full.
You have been in this loop before. You will be in this loop again.
#MemeMonday #linux #sysadmin
Spring break reminder:
Those Jira tickets will still be there next week. Don’t forget the people who matter most. Step away from the keyboard when you can.
CUDA configuration is eating your AI project's time and nobody's talking about it.
I sat down with #CIQ 's #DamenKnight to dig into why general-purpose Linux wasn't built for GPU workloads and what "validated" actually means.
https://podcast.itguyeric.com/20
#Linux #CUDA #AIInfrastructure #MLOps #GPU
You might work for a toxic company if: you're battling insomnia and their response is a Performance Improvement Plan.
Not a check in. Not "hey, are you doing okay?" People go through things. Sleep, health, family, all of it. A decent company notices and gives you a little room. A toxic one sees a dip in output and reaches for the folder.
How a company treats you on your worst week tells you everything about whether it's a good one.
This week’s #StarTrek #StrangeNewWorlds was an incredible experiment! I got real Event Horizon (1997) vibes!
#TechTipThursday
Want to check or change your system locale on Linux?
localectl status
To list available locales:
localectl list-locales
To set one:
localectl set-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8
Handy when you're deploying systems for users in different regions or when something's outputting dates and currencies in a format that makes no sense to you.
#linux #sysadmin
Dwarf Fortress has been on my watch list for a long time now. I tried Satisfactory once, wasn't really my speed, but I may have to give it another try.
I'll be on the radio this morning!
I'm joining Noah Chelliah on Critical Thought (News Radio 1310 KNOX) to talk about passwords and technology; I should be on around 10:06am Central! We'll be talking passwords and Bitwarden!
https://knoxradio.com/critical-thought/
#passwords #bitwarden #opensource
A small productivity trick that helps me:
I pick one “must win” task for the day. If everything explodes (which… IT), I still end the day with one meaningful win.
Momentum beats perfection.
#Productivity #TechLife #Focus
Wrote something new: what #PragmaticMarketing is, and why "your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant." (Their words, not mine!)
Spent years watching teams argue about features in a conference room, all of them sure they knew what customers wanted. Pragmatic Marketing is the antidote to that. It's a framework built on a simple, yet revolutionary 😉 idea: go TALK to the market instead of trusting your gut:
https://itguyeric.com/blog/what-is-pragmatic-marketing/
#ProductMarketing #ProductManagement #Marketing #B2B