Welcome to Larvitz Blog! I’m Christian, a Senior Consultant by day and FreeBSD enthusiast by night, with over 20 years in enterprise IT. Here I write about FreeBSD jails, PF firewalling, self-hosting, Linux system administration, and anything that’s cleanly engineered. Most articles are hands-on guides born from running my own infrastructure, from dual-stack networking and Ansible automation to hosting a Mastodon instance on FreeBSD.

Have a question or want to discuss something? Find me on the Fediverse at @Larvitz@burningboard.net. I’m always happy to chat!

#chezmoi Articles

Thu 15 October 2026
FreeBSD

The T480 Is Back: My FreeBSD 15.1 Laptop, From Boot to Browser

My ThinkPad T480 now runs FreeBSD 15.1 as a complete desktop: Xfce 4.20, 5 GHz Wi-Fi, verified VA-API video decoding in Firefox and Chromium, Bluetooth audio, a webcam that handles Zoom calls in Firefox, a smart-card-backed SSH and Git workflow, and coding agents. Here are the packages, configuration, tests and machine-specific traps behind a laptop I can simply use.

Wed 12 August 2026
Linux

Chezmoi and Git: Dotfiles Without Pretending Every Machine Is the Same

A Git repository is a good place for configuration files, but it does not know where they belong, which permissions they need, or why a work laptop and a home server should differ. Chezmoi adds that missing layer. This is how I use both tools to manage fish, Git, Neovim, GnuPG, OpenSSH and Atuin, including the recovery command for the inevitable day I edit a live file directly.