Beginner on Tom Meurs

Linux Is for Everyone: Why This Blog Now Welcomes Beginners Too

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:28:00 +0100

My neighbour is 70 years old. He’s used Windows his whole life. Last month he asked me: “Tom, I keep hearing about Linux. Is that something for me too?”

He’s not the first. Over the past year I’ve had the same question from friends, family and colleagues, each in their own shape. “I want to get off Windows, but where do I start?” “Is Linux hard?” “Can I still use my normal programs?” To me these are easy questions. I’ve been running Linux since SuSE 6.0, back when you picked your hardware by whether a Linux driver existed for it. If you’ve never seen a terminal, they’re not easy at all.

Data Poisoning: Reclaiming Your Privacy Through Offence

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:43:00 +0100

Here’s how privacy works today. You read the policy. You dismiss the cookie banner. You hunt through three settings menus for the opt-out toggle that someone buried on purpose. All of that to exercise a right that should’ve been the default. And while you’re still on the first paragraph of the terms of service, every click, scroll, hover and the exact timing of your keystrokes has already been harvested, packaged and sold. Somewhere along the way I stopped finding that strange, and that bothers me more than the harvesting does.

Terminal Multiplexing: tmux vs Zellij vs Screen

Thu, 14 May 2026 19:00:00 +0100

The first time it bit me I was halfway through a database migration over SSH. The train went into a tunnel, the WiFi dropped, and the process on the other end died with the connection. I sat looking at a dead prompt, wondering how much of the migration had committed.

A multiplexer would have saved me that hour. The process keeps running on the server whether I’m attached or not, so a dropped connection costs me a reconnect and nothing else. I reattach and the work is where I left it. That one property is why a multiplexer goes on every machine I touch, before the editor and before the dotfiles.

Tailscale for Homelab: Secure Remote Access Without Port Forwarding

Sun, 10 May 2026 18:45:00 +0100

TL;DR Tailscale puts every device I own on one WireGuard mesh, so I reach the cluster in the closet from a coffee shop without a single port forwarded on the router. Subnet router, exit node, the Kubernetes operator, ACLs, and Headscale for the part I’d rather host myself, in that order.

My homelab cluster runs in a closet at home. I don’t. I work from coffee shops, from a client’s office, and now and then from a hotel with WiFi that seems to resent me. I still want my own machines while I’m out there.

The Lost Art of Software Optimization: What Demoscene Taught Us About Sustainability

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 20:42:00 +0100

Most of us ship software the same way now. Pick a framework, pull in a few hundred dependencies, and the service idles at a gigabyte of RAM before it does its first useful piece of work. Nobody profiles it. If it’s slow, you scale up. Compute is cheap, your time isn’t, and the bill goes to someone else. I don’t say that as a complaint. I’ve done it, and I’ll do it again on the next deadline.

Simulation, Emulation, Virtualization, and Containers: The Restaurant Metaphor

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:18:00 +0100

TL;DR Simulation models a thing without running it. Emulation runs it by rebuilding the hardware in software. Virtualization runs several complete operating systems on one machine. Containers run several apps on one kernel. Below, one restaurant per term, a table, and the four mix-ups I hear most.

“So what’s the difference between a container and a virtual machine?”

I get this question a lot, usually from someone smart who’s been nodding along in meetings and doesn’t quite want to admit they’re fuzzy on it. The honest answer is that most explanations make it worse. They open with “hypervisor”, “kernel sharing” and “hardware abstraction”, and now the person has four new terms to be confused about instead of one.

Zero Trust Explained: The Hotel Key Card Metaphor

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:34:00 +0100

TL;DR The old model is a castle. Get past the wall and you’re trusted everywhere inside. Zero trust is a hotel. Your key card opens your room, the gym if you booked it, and nothing else, and every door checks the card every time. Below, the three principles, a day in that hotel, and what the key card turns into once the doors are software.

“So what is this zero trust thing everyone keeps talking about?”

Learn the Defaults: Why Portability Beats Customization

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:47:00 +0100

TL;DR I spent years polishing a vim and tmux setup, then sat useless in front of a stock vim on a production server. So I learned the defaults I’d been overriding all along, and moved my customizations on top of them instead of in place of them. What that looks like for vim, tmux and the shell tools, and the four checks I use to find the gaps.

For years my setup was the thing I was proudest of. A dotfiles repo with commits going back further than some of my jobs, a vim config that pulled in thirty plugins, the tmux prefix moved somewhere comfortable, a prompt that took a weekend to get right. Down to the last keybinding, it was mine. On my laptop I was fast, and I hardly thought about the tools at all. Muscle memory did the work.

Dotfile Management with mise and chezmoi: The Perfect Combo

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:23:00 +0100

TL;DR Six ways of syncing dotfiles later, the one I kept is chezmoi for the files and mise for the tool versions, with the mise config living inside the chezmoi repo. Templates handle the work laptop against the personal desktop, age handles the secrets, and a fresh machine is one command and about five minutes. The walk-through goes from one managed file to the bootstrap I run for real.

My .zshrc is older than some of my coworkers’ careers. Same for my .vimrc and my tmux config. They’ve grown into a setup that does exactly what I want, and I’d be lost without them. The catch is that I run more than one machine. A laptop, a desktop, now and then a throwaway VM for testing. For years, keeping those in sync was a pile of hacks I didn’t trust.

Why Privacy Matters More Than Ever

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 14:00:00 +0100

Your phone logged where you slept before you woke up. You check Gmail, search something on Google, message a friend on WhatsApp, pay for coffee with a card and walk past a dozen cameras before lunch. None of that feels like surveillance. It feels like a normal morning.

It felt the same five years ago, and I want to show you what changed in between. The comfortable version of privacy, “I have nothing to hide”, has quietly stopped being true, and I think most people haven’t noticed. Three things happened at once. On its own each one is manageable. Together they’re what worries me.

The Hardware Ownership Paradox: When Sovereignty Gets Expensive

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:00:00 +0100

In my previous post about self-hosting for everyone I drew a hopeful picture of managed self-hosting, where anyone can own their data. I skipped over something, and it’s been bugging me since. Hardware costs money, and the sum comes out very differently depending on whether a business or a person is paying.

So here are two rules. Both sound reasonable on their own. Then I’ll put them in the same room.

Self-Hosting for Everyone: A Vision for Digital Agency

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 14:00:00 +0100

Most people keep their photos at Google, their mail at Gmail, their documents in whatever cloud came with the phone and their passwords in a browser built by an advertising company. Every byte sits on a server they don’t own, under terms they didn’t read, in a country they didn’t check. Nobody finds that strange anymore, because the alternative looks like a second job.

I want to talk about that alternative, and about why it sits behind a wall most people will never climb.

The space container thought experiment: systems thinking for survival

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 14:00:00 +0100

You wake up. It’s dark. Somewhere a fan is humming.

Your eyes adjust. You’re in a container. Metal walls, a few small windows, and behind them stars. Just stars. No Earth anywhere.

There’s a note taped to the wall:

“You have everything you need to survive. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. Good luck.”

I bring this one up with friends when the evening has gone quiet enough for it. It sounds like science fiction, and the first reaction is usually a joke about the toilet. Then somebody asks what’s in the room, and we’re off. What the experiment takes away is an assumption I’d never said out loud before I ran it. That there’s an “outside” that absorbs my mistakes and refills my supplies.

Pass: the Unix password manager that just works

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0100

TL;DR pass keeps each password as a GPG-encrypted file in a directory, and the directory is the whole data model. pass -c email/gmail puts a password in your clipboard from any terminal, pass git push backs the store up, and the fzf script further down is how I look up every password I have. The price is GPG key management, and it’s a real price.

I used KeePass for years. Then 1Password. Then Bitwarden. All decent tools, and every one of them was too much for what I asked of it. Too much UI, too many features, and a password always lived on the other side of an app I had to alt-tab into. A small interruption, and they added up.

GPG explained: from first key to daily use

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:00:00 +0100

TL;DR GPG encrypts files and signs things, and it sits under pass, under signed git commits and under the checksums maintainers publish. One command gives you a working keypair in five minutes. Subkeys and a YubiKey come later, if ever, and the UX is bad enough that I complain about it at length below.

GPG is a tool I kept meaning to learn and didn’t, for years. The docs are a wall of text, the terminology is its own dialect, and the error messages are cryptic in both senses of the word.

Taskwarrior, Timewarrior and Vit: The Ultimate CLI Productivity Stack

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 15:00:00 +0100

TL;DR Taskwarrior, timewarrior and vit are my task list, my time tracking and the vim-style screen on top, all in the terminal and all plain text in ~/.task. Two commands get you started. The rest of this post is what I bolted on afterwards, from projects and dependencies to a self-hosted sync server, and you can stop at any section.

For context on how my brain works, see Working with an AuDHD Brain.

Why I self-host everything: on sovereignty, agency and control

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 18:00:00 +0100

For a long time the cloud was just the water I swam in. I provisioned managed Kubernetes, clicked through the console, pasted a Terraform module someone else had written, and shipped. It worked. The bill landed every month, the dashboards stayed green, and I didn’t look underneath. Why would I? I trusted it the way you trust a lift. Press the button, doors open.

Then one afternoon a managed service fell over and I sat there with nothing to debug. No host to SSH into, no log I was allowed to read, nothing underneath it I could open up. The status page said “investigating”. Refreshing a page someone else controlled was the whole of my afternoon.

Working with an AuDHD brain: why I automate everything

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 14:00:00 +0100

For a long time I thought the problem was me.

I have AuDHD , autism and ADHD together. The ADHD is ADHD-PI, the inattentive kind, without the hyperactivity most people picture when they hear the word. For years I treated the whole thing as a defect I’d train away. I bought the planners. I read the productivity books. Every week I told myself that Monday I’d finally be disciplined.