This is a look at some of the things I’ve worked on in my spare time during 2020. I started branching into new areas this year such as hobby OS dev, writing, and music theory, as well as continuing to work on roguelike games and supporting libraries.

Here’s a guide for myself on how to format and mount an NTFS partition on FreeBSD. These examples were run on FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE.

List disks:

# geom disk list
...
Geom name: da1
Providers:
1. Name: da1
   Mediasize: 1000204886016 (932G)
   Sectorsize: 512
   Stripesize: 4096
   Stripeoffset: 0
   Mode: r0w0e0
   descr: HGST TOURO S
   lunid: 5000000000000001
   ident: 21001410170002100173
   rotationrate: unknown
   fwsectors: 63
   fwheads: 255

Of all the programs I’ve written, perhaps the one that has most directly benefited me is this little bash script in my dotfiles repo which runs the application launcher dmenu showing the most-frequently-used programs first.

The typical way to run dmenu is to pipe the output of dmenu_path into dmenu. Both commands come in the dmenu package. The former simply prints a list of all programs in the user’s path:

$ dmenu_path
[
2to3-2.7
2to3-3.7
aafire
aainfo
aalib-config
aasavefont
aatest
ac
accton
...

This is a follow-up to Why you need a .bashrc and .profile

Unix processes run in an environment consisting of string values assigned to named environment variables. Some processes such as a shell or window manager are responsible for launching additional processes. By convention, new processes inherit the environment variables of the process that created them.