Whatever peaked my interest

Adding Fediverse comments to my blog

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:40:00 +0100

Quite some time ago, I read a post (in Czech) by Jirka Eischmann writing about how he connected his blog and Mastodon. It sounded really cool and I was thinking how to achieve the same. But the blog was about Wordpress. And I have a static blog. "Compiled" into html by Hugo and AsciiDoctor and then served as a static website by Nginx.

I found some software that could do some parts of it. Let’s take a look at those parts separately. First thing is making my posts visible on Fediverse. I haven’t found any template how to do it directly in Hugo. And when investigating it further I wasn’t sure whether it would be possible to join Fediverse with completely static website.

Looking forward to my Mecha Comet

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:40:00 +0100

We manged to get a booth at this years FOSDEM and went there with Turris and Bird. It was a blast, but let’s talk about that some other time. I want to share my thoughts about one really interesting project I re-discovered there.

What is it?

Yes, as the title suggest, I’m going to write about Mecha Comet. For those who don’t know, let’s introduce the project. It is open source Linux device, let’s call it PDA. It has a touch display, it is battery powered, it is not a phone and it runs Linux. Not Android, but a real GNU/Linux. In this case Fedora. This by itself makes the device interesting. But there is yet another cool feature. Extensibility.

Orange Pi RV - My new Risc V NAS

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 21:40:00 +0100

I got myself a new toy. Yet another Risc V SBC! I already have a VisionFive 2 that is serving as a "virtualisation platform" (running several containers) and now I wanted to redo my NAS setup and as I have my drives connected via USB, I was looking for a board with at least 4 USB 3.0. I was thinking some cheap ARM board but than I saw that Orange Pi has RV board. It is same SoC as my VisionFive and device tree is in vanilla kernel starting 6.19. What more to ask for? I ordered it right away and now I have it at home.

Using not so smart phone

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 22:40:00 +0100

As everybody, I have a smart phone. But half of the last year, I was using a "not so smart" phone on daily basis. And I was surprised, but I kinda liked it. What was my experience? What unique features did it offer? Was there anything that I was missing? And how does it compare to the life with a smart phone.

I actually had a smart phone as my main phone for quite some time. My first smart phone was Palm Centro probably sometime around 2008. Even before that I had various Palm PDAs and phones with either infrared port or Bluetooth. Back then, combining PDA and Phone made a lot of sense. You got a really cool features. Like silent mode when there was an event in your calendar. MP3 ringtones and different ringtones for different groups of people. And limitless storage for SMS. Internet connectivity was much more stable and having full QWERTY keyboard in your pocket really helped.

SaltStack, DNS and TLSA

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 09:20:00 +0100

Lately I blogged about how am I managing my DNS entries via SaltStack. So far it was about being a great time saver, but nothing that you couldn’t do manually with considerably more effort. This time, let’s take a look at something that would be in some setups almost impossible manually - adding TLSA records for your webs.

What is TLSA

TLSA records specify SSL certificate used by specified service. The records looks something like this:

SaltStack, DNS and ssh

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 09:20:00 +0100

In my last post, I showed how we can combine SaltStack and Knot to have some basic records filled your zone. As I was introducing the concept, I picked the most obvious and basic entries. But since we have a hammer now, everything starts to look like a nail. And there is much more that can be stored in DNS apart from IP addresses. Let’s take a look at some other examples and how to get them automatically filled in by SaltStack.

Managing DNS via SaltStack

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 14:00:00 +0100

Running services online without domain is hard. More services you run, more DNS entries you need to manage. More services you run, more servers you need to manage. And when you manage several servers, it’s time to use some orchestration. But what about all those domains associated with those servers and services? Can’t that be also part of the orchestration? Somehow automated? Of-course it can. Let me tell you how am I handling it for my domains and servers.

Orchestration via SaltStack

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 14:40:00 +0100

This post will be about my approach to something that is almost obsolete. It is about orchestration. Back in the old days, people used to have a real computers or virtual machines and used to install and configure software. And also maintain it for years to come. I know that nowadays, you just create a bunch of pods, each one consisting from multiple containers you downloaded from DockerHub and whenever you need to reconfigure or update something, you just throw them away. Or even the whole datacenter. But I’m old and I still maintain individual systems with multiple services running. And jokes aside, when you do that, you want to have some automation to make it easier. That is what orchestration is for - to manage multiple machines from one central point and to make sure that everything is up to date and configured consistently.

Joining the fediverse

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 23:00:00 +0200

Some time ago, I joined the Fediverse. Why and why now? I actually gave it a try few times already I tried it many years ago with Friendica. I actually run it for a while and posted there but I can’t find any traces of it anywhere so it was a really really long time ago (sometime before 2015). It was nice, but social network by myself is kinda boring so it eventually died out.

Using Password Store with Saltstack

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 20:00:00 +0200

I’m using Password store for a long time and I love it. It is simple, intuitive and it just works. Recently I started adding some more formulas into my Saltstack and I started searching for a way how to store some password that are going to be set via Salt. It stand to reason to check whether I can use Password Store with Salt somehow. I found that there is pass renderer already part of Salt itself. I checked it out, but in the end, I ended up forking it. Continue reading to find out how, why and what is the result and what is my final setup.

Baofeng BF-T1 review

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 23:00:00 +0100

Recently I decided that my family needs walkie-talkies. My daughter started riding a bike and I needed to stay in contact with her when she ventures too far. Ideally without shouting my lungs out. For my use case I don’t need really big range, I need something cheap that works and supports some kind of filtering so we wouldn’t be disturbed by people using the same frequency. For the future use, VOX functionality and headset would be a plus.

A little trick for Salt key exchange

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 21:00:00 +0100

This is mostly a note to myself. Once in a long while I need to add a new computer as Salt minion. And I always forget how to verify the fingerprints of the key. I know the probability of somebody intercepting the handshake is low, but it is possible nevertheless.

Switching to static blog

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 22:00:00 +0100

Long time ago, I started writing a blog. Nowadays it is kinda old fashion. People just watch TicTok at best. Nobody reads anymore.

I also write less and less. Kinda because it is hard to find the time and hard to finish. I have few articles that I haven’t finished in my old Wordpress instance just lying around. I just can’t get around to finish them. Part of the problem is that I don’t have a time in front of of computer. When I’m in front of computer, I have a ton of work that I need to do and finishing article and publishing it is quite down the list.

About me

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 22:18:59 +0100

My name is Michal Hrušecký, I was born in 1984 in Prague, Czech republic and I’m still living in the same city. I used to work in SuSE Linux s. r. o. as openSUSE Booster. My job was maintaining several packages (for example MySQL related ones), working on Boosters projects, giving talks and presentations and helping community. Then I moved to working in open source team in company called Eaton as a software engineer hoping to promote the right way (open source one) in non-IT and old-fashioned company :-) But in the end, it didn’t worked out for me and I moved to another company. Company that again does a lot of opensource. And where I get to play with interesting hardware as well. My current employer is CZ.NIC - Czech domain registry, that does plenty of software development and also produces opensource routers called Turris. And those routers are what I’m playing with in my day job.

Thinking about getting a smart watch

Sun, 30 Sep 2018 20:00:29 +0000

Smart watches are obviously the cool thing right now. I took a look at few of them and I like some of the features, but so far I haven’t found the one that would be a perfect fit for me. What do I miss? I’ll write about that bellow with few examples of the watches that I kinda like for one reason or other. And if I missed the ultimate one, please let me know!

Why I bought Turris MOX and why it is worth considering

Mon, 14 May 2018 05:45:42 +0000

Let’s start this with a little background. I work at CZ.NIC on Turris project. So I’m definitely biased. But this post is my own, written in my free time and express just my own opinions and it explicitly doesn’t represent opinions of the company I work for unless by chance.

So now you know the background, so let’s take a look at what Turris MOX actually is. It is marketed as modular open source router. Well Turris project is about secure routers, so it makes sense. But what I like about it is that it is actually quite nice and modular single board computer. If you are wondering what single board computers are, check Wikipedia or think Raspberry Pi which is the most well known example and probably one of the worst options you have.

Honeypot as a service

Fri, 23 Feb 2018 15:00:39 +0000

I’m currently working at CZ.NIC, Czech domain registry on project Turris which are awesome open source WiFI (or WiFi free) routers. For those we developed quite some interesting features. One of them is honeypot that you don’t run on your own hardware (what if somebody managed to escape) but you basically do man in the middle on the attacker and forward him to the honeypot we are running behind many firewalls. We had this option for quite some time on our routers. But because plenty of people around the world found the idea really interesting and wanted to join, this part of our project got separated, has its own team of developers and maintainers and you can now join with your own server as well! And to make it super easy, packages are available in Tumbleweed already and also in security repo where they are being build for Leap as well.

Running for re-election

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 08:00:07 +0000

As you might have noticed, I’m running for re-election. I served my first term as openSUSE Board member, learned a lot and I think I could represent you well for another two years. Although this years elections will be tough as we have in the end quite some strong candidates. So honestly, I have no worries regarding result of the elections as it can’t end badly. Compare it to real world politics and elections where the results can be either bad or even worse… But even though our elections are quite friendly, it is still competition. So what would I do if I get elected? Why should you vote for me? I’ll try to answer it in this post.

Turris Omnia and openSUSE

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 05:29:10 +0000

About two weeks ago I was on the annual openSUSE Board face to face meeting. It was great and you can read reports of what was going on in there on openSUSE project mailing list. In this post I would like to focus on my other agenda I had while coming to Nuremberg. Nuremberg is among other things SUSE HQ and therefore there is a high concentration of skilled engineers and I wanted to take an advantage of that…

Shell calendar generator

Sun, 03 Apr 2016 18:45:21 +0000

Some people still use paper calendars. Stuff where you have a picture of the month and all days in the month listed. I have some relatives that do use those. On loosely related topic, I like to travel and I like to take some pictures in foreign lands. So combining both is an obvious idea – to create a calendar where pictures of the month are taken by me. I searched for some ready to use solution but haven’t found anything. So I decided to create my own simple tool. And this post is about creating that tool.