Piero Vera

Darktable editing workflow: scene-referred update

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 11:45:00 -0500

Over five years after I did my initial post on working with Darktable, much of Darktable’s processing has changed, notably by switching into a scene-referred workflow, which has deprecated many of the modules I used to use. I’ve adapted and improved my workflow with the new processing pipeline, and it has worked much better than it used to with the display-referred workflow.

Manage and secure your passwords across devices using Pass and GPG

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 15:20:00 -0600

With security breaches happening left and right, the importance of having unique, strong passwords for each account has never been higher. However, remembering all these long passwords is nearly impossible for most people, and relying on your memory is impractical nevertheless.

This has turned password managers into a necessity in this internet age. While keeping a physical password book is still an option, it’s not as resilient nor as convenient as a proper password manager. Many password managers are closed source and your data is hosted on some company’s servers. While it may not be an issue, ultimately you don’t have control over the keys to your entire internet life. You must entrust these companies with storing and handling your data responsibly and securely.

Photo editing workflow using Darktable

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 20:30:00 -0500

Before switching to Linux, I used to have an Adobe Photoshop photo workflow. I never used Lightroom, so when I switched over, I had to redesign my workflow from the ground up. After trying out a few photo editors, I ended up settling on Darktable. It’s available for free for Windows, Mac, Linux and BSD.

I won’t cover tagging, geotagging nor any other photo organization techniques, nor will I go into the various other functions Darktable has, for example, tethered shooting, print previews, among others.

Simple application sandboxing using AppArmor and Firejail

Wed, 17 Jun 2020 15:43:08 -0500

Security is one of the most important and overlooked aspects of modern computing. We tend to let the default security configurations do the work, or on Windows, we simply install some anti-virus and be done with it. However, applications are increasingly privileged and we find ourselves running programs that could represent a security vulnerability to our systems and, more importantly, to our information.

Sandboxing allows us to limit what each application can see and what it can access, as well as what it can do in your system. Clearly not all applications need sandboxing, for example, your text editor probably isn’t a security vulnerability. Regardless, applications like browsers are the source of many security vulnerabilities, even though they already do some sandboxing themselves.

Deploying a simple static website using Nginx and Hugo

Sat, 13 Jun 2020 15:40:00 -0500

Throwing together a simple static website is very simple using Hugo and Nginx. This assumes that you have the following:

A Linux box (I’ll be using Debian).
A domain (any domain should work, you can get a free one at NoIP.

Setting up the domain

Depending on your domain registrar, setting up the DNS records to point your domain to the IP address of your Linux box might be different. Look up how to set up DDNS in your provider’s help pages. If you’re running the server in your home network, you will have to forward ports 80 and 443 in your router and point them at the server. Be sure to configure the server with a static IP address as well.

About Hugo

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Hugo is the world’s fastest framework for building websites. It is written in Go.

It makes use of a variety of open source projects including:

Learn more and contribute on GitHub.