Larvitz Blog
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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!

#rust Articles

Hardware Keys Without GnuPG: The Rust OpenPGP Card Stack, Now in FreeBSD Ports

Three small Rust tools from the OpenPGP Card project replace the GnuPG stack for my everyday hardware key work: oct to manage OpenPGP cards and Nitrokeys, oct-git to sign Git commits, and openpgp-card-ssh-agent as a hardware-backed SSH agent. I ported all three to FreeBSD and they are now in the ports tree. This article explains what each tool does, how they share PIN handling, and how I set them up on Fedora and on my FreeBSD T480.

ArtCraft: Desktop Apps Built with AI, Useful Results, and Open Questions

ArtCraft is attempting to rebuild familiar creative and office applications in Rust with AI coding agents. PhotoCraft worked for my thumbnails, the applications started quickly, and native FreeBSD builds exist. Those are interesting observations, but they do not establish equivalence with Photoshop or Office. A look at the project, its agent-friendly architecture, and the questions that remain about correctness, maintenance and its future.

I Wanted an IPv4 Toast and Accidentally Built an IP Service

At 10:15 this morning I added a gently condescending toast for IPv4-only visitors to hofstede.it. It called ipify, which felt increasingly inappropriate for somebody operating an ASN. Three hours later I had written a Rust IP-information service, put it behind Caddy, given it three DNS names, and deployed it in its own dual-stack FreeBSD VNET jail. This is how a two-line dependency became infrastructure.
  • Sun 16 August 2026
  • Linux

Crawlfest: Building a Terminal Roguelike in Rust

For a few months now I have been building a terminal roguelike in Rust in the spirit of ADOM and NetHack. This article is about the technical groundwork: why ratatui and legion instead of a game engine, how the four map generators work (rooms, cellular-automata caverns, hand-drawn prefabs, and a hybrid of the last two), how field of view and A* pathfinding hook into my own map type through two traits, how content lives in RON files instead of code, and how save games avoid serialising the ECS at all.