Hey there, stranger! 馃憢

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.
Neovim logo with the beginnings of some commands involve search and global

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
Large Neovim logo, partly out of frame with a chalk arrow pointing to a smaller neovim logo with the word 'mini'.

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 Logo with a Medicine Icon, Colorized

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
Part 2 of my foray into HomeAssistant dashboard featuring BirdNET-Pi Sensors

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
BirdNET-Pi and HomeAssistant: Happier together!

Creating a BirdNetPi Dashboard in HomeAssistant - Part 1

This is Part One of a Two Part Series. You can find Part Two, here. Update: 10/11/2023. A huge thanks to Mastodon User e_mobile2014 who found a broken link in this guide and pointed out that I never explained how to get the mqtt sensors into HomeAssistant! What you will need BirdNET-Pi HomeAssistant AppDaemon MQTT Broker (I use Mosquitto) Background In early 2023, at the height of the Raspberry Pi shortage I felt like a king with an extra Rpi laying around, not being used....

September 30, 2023 路 12 min 路 2484 words 路 Me
git commands

Pushing a Single Local Git Repo to Multiple Remote Repos

Why push to multiple repos? Do want to use both Github & and a Self-hosted Git Repo? Here鈥檚 how I鈥檝e been doing it! I really enjoy self-hosting services that I use everyday. One of those includes a git-style version control software. In my case, I鈥檝e been running Gitea for a few years now and have been really satisfied with everything (except for that one time that an update broke all my templates)....

September 22, 2023 路 2 min 路 403 words 路 Me
Hugo Logo, Nginx Logo, Tired Face emoji

Trouble Hosting Hugo with Nginx

Intro For the last 3 days, I have been spending a few hours after working trying to figure out why my brand new Hugo site was not loading correctly on my sub-domain. For context, I use Nginx to host all my apps and servers, most of them using reverse proxy protocols such as $proxy_host, $forward_scheme, and $port. There are a few more and I鈥檓 happy to share some reverse proxy nginx config files....

September 20, 2023 路 5 min 路 888 words 路 Me