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Welcome to my running collection of tips, tricks, and scripts about self-hosting and DIY. Outwardly, this is my “living resume” to showcase how I leverage my technical abilities in non-technical roles. Inwardly, this is something I can refer back to for items that don’t quite belong in my internal documentation, but are more in depth than a Mastodon post.

How to Revisit your Terminal Session's History

I can鈥檛 believe I didn鈥檛 know about this command beforehand. When I first got into self-hosting and homelabbing, one of the app ideas I had that would help me with internal documentation is a terminal program that saves your input and output to a file for you to review later and extract the key commands you used. I also had the bonus idea that you could add comments as you were writing out commands....

March 19, 2024 路 3 min 路 481 words 路 Me

Google Sheets to Slides with Scripts: an Automation

Overview Recently, my wife needed help in sharing weekly content with a group of people. The original way this group was sharing content was a PDF export of a Google Doc. From a User Experience perspective, it wasn鈥檛 great. Someone would received this long PDF, they would have to scroll to find the date or topic of the next additional_notes, and overall didn鈥檛 look great. While she had developed the Google Sheets and Google Slide system to make everything a bit more legible and navigable, there was still an element of copy and paste from the Sheet to the Slide....

February 25, 2024 路 14 min 路 2963 words 路 Me

QuickHits: OpenResty and Package Updates

Turns out I wrote this back in November, but on a different machine and I never pushed my changes up to git. So here it is now! The last two times I鈥檝e run apt update && apt upgrade -y on my web server and OpenResty has an update to push out, I will get some errors including Openresty is not setup correctly. There are a few other errors in the systemctl status openresty output such as process 223478 [nginx] is still running....

December 4, 2023 路 3 min 路 492 words 路 Me

Neovim Subtitute Magic

This week, I鈥檝e had to make some changes to an automation we had setup for a customer in Workato. The original recipe was made by a co-worker with a bunch of javascript nodes. Even though I鈥檓 customer facing and generally not considered a technical employee, I knew the engineer who worked on this was swamped, so I decided to jump in. In order to greatly reduce the number of nodes needed in the single recipe, I created a list of dictionaries in python (with one of the values being another list!...

November 15, 2023 路 6 min 路 1221 words 路 Me

Mini Neovim

If I鈥檓 being honest, when I started this quick project to reduce my Neovim plugin footprint size, I thought I was going to be able to get rid of way more plugins! Inspired by this Reddit post that setup a Neovim config using only echasnovski鈥檚 mini library, I was reminded that some of my remote server environments were still using Packer as their plugin manager, where my main machine has upgraded to Lazy....

October 20, 2023 路 3 min 路 602 words 路 Me

ESP8266 Medicine Indicator Light

This is a quick treat! We recently learned that one of our children needs to take medicine twice a day for the foreseeable future. He鈥檚 too young to take it on his own, so the twice-a-day responsibility is split up between my partner and I. However, sometimes our schedules don鈥檛 overlap so succinctly, so we needed some sort of indicator to let the other know if the previous dose was (or wasn鈥檛!...

October 16, 2023 路 6 min 路 1170 words 路 Me

BirdNET-PI & HomeAssistant: Part 2

Checking for Entities If you鈥檙e following up on this from my first post, you鈥檝e already added your AppDaemon script and confirmed that the AppDaemon logs don鈥檛 show any errors. Now is the true test if it鈥檚 working: do you have the new sensors in HomeAssistant?! The best way to do this is by just type e from any screen in the HomeAssistant UI! That will bring up a list of entities....

October 4, 2023 路 10 min 路 1986 words 路 Me