gavinj.net

Thoughts on technology, infrastructure, and AI

One Jump Box, Many Users: Multi-User RDP on Ubuntu 26.04

September 3, 2026 • homelab, linux, ubuntu

Part 1 of building a hardened multi-user jump host: why the Essential Eight pushes you towards one, and how to get xrdp serving concurrent sessions on Wayland-native Ubuntu 26.04.

There's No Kimi Button: Custom Providers on Pangolin's New AI Gateway

August 30, 2026 • pangolin, ai-gateway, kimi

Pangolin 1.22 shipped an AI Gateway this week. The provider list covers OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini, but there's no Kimi or DeepSeek button. Here's how to register both as custom providers, and why the missing buttons turn out not to matter.

The eggplant in the address bar: what an emoji subdomain taught me about the modern web

August 28, 2026 • emoji, dns, idn

My friend Rob registered 🍆.prawnburrito.com, pointed it at my blog, and gave me a reason to look at how emoji domains work, where they break, and why the standards bodies quietly wish people would stop.

Twenty Years of LastPass, One Afternoon of Vaultwarden

August 28, 2026 • vaultwarden, bitwarden, passwords

I stood up an offline Vaultwarden server with Docker Compose and an nginx reverse proxy, moved the team onto it, and started planning how to feed its secrets to Ansible across a fleet of Ubuntu servers. It went well enough that LastPass should be nervous.

PowerDNS: DNS Without the Archaeology

August 13, 2026 • powerdns, poweradmin, dns

A look at PowerDNS, the excellent Poweradmin web interface, and a design for sharing centrally managed zones across several isolated security domains.

gav.ilicio.us

mlc-ai/web-llm: High-performance In-browser LLM Inference Engine
Web-LLM is a high-performance in-browser LLM inference engine. Running models locally in the browser removes the need to send prompts to a server and opens up offline or privacy-sensitive use cases.
Reverse Engineering Unknown File Formats with ImHex
This article introduces ImHex by reverse engineering FEZ's save file format. ImHex has become one of the best hex editors I have found recently, and the pattern matching features are particularly useful for decomposing binary files.
'Just use a VPS bro' (OpenClaw version)
This video really encapsulates my life as a Linux admin at this point in time.
A Walkable ASCII Cyberpunk City in One HTML File
I think I'm going to buy this! A walkable ASCII cyberpunk city rendered in a single HTML file.
General Resolution: LLM usage in Debian
This was a really progressive resolution, you can't please everyone - the smartest people I know lean into this technology. I think this will ultimately accelerate Debian and FOSS in general.
OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally
Bob might be getting an upgrade ...
binvis.io: Visual analysis of binary files in the browser
binvis.io is a browser-based tool for visualizing binary files. It maps bytes to colors using space-filling curves and entropy visualization, making it easier to spot structure, compressed sections, and encrypted regions without uploading data to a server.
Tailscale/tailcat: Like netcat, but over Tailscale's data plane
Tailcat is a netcat-style utility that runs over Tailscale's encrypted data plane without needing Tailscale's control plane. It is useful for point-to-point connectivity in environments where the full Tailscale coordination server is not practical.
Nvidia closes in on Hugging Face acquisition
Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face, the open-source AI model hub, for $12.9 billion. The acquisition would extend Nvidia's influence from silicon into the platform layer and give it a stronger position in cloud services.
Z.ai Open-Sources 'Ox Alpha' Model as GLM-5.3-Flash
Z.ai is releasing its Ox Alpha reasoning model under an open-source license as GLM-5.3-Flash. The move puts another high-performance open-weight model into circulation as the release cadence from Chinese labs and their partners continues to accelerate.