Tag: Projects

  • Measuring AT&T Internet Bandwidth with Python, InfluxDB, and Grafana

    Measuring AT&T Internet Bandwidth with Python, InfluxDB, and Grafana

    Any technical system you build inevitably slides into decay as the ecosystem you’ve borrowed from upgrades slowly over time while you’re off doing other things. The parts you custom tailored now no longer fit. Some of the suppliers go out of business. Some changed businesses altogether. That’s where I find myself with my home network…

  • Becoming Anti-social

    Becoming Anti-social

    This isn’t about becoming anti-social in the traditional sense, but more anti-social media. Asocial would be a more accurate term. A few years back I made a decision to disconnect from most social media platforms. If you wanted to get in touch with me or know what I was doing, you would have to see…

  • Random Playlist Selector with Sonos and Home Assistant

    Random Playlist Selector with Sonos and Home Assistant

    Here’s something different for the blog. I’ve taken some inspiration from the HashiCorp RFC and am tracking my personal project that way. I find it useful. Problem Statement I get tired of listening to the same playlist too often. I also want to reduce the number of choices I need to make in the day.…

  • Converting from Goodreads to Obsidian

    Converting from Goodreads to Obsidian

    Last month I got an idea that I’d like to do book reviews in my Obsidian note taking vault. This would satisfy a few problems I’ve had: There were GREAT plugins available like the Obsidian Book Search plugin. However, there wasn’t anything that would take my 400+ books with review text, rating, date read, and…

  • nftables!?

    nftables!?

    Apparently while I was busy working on some other things, the world switched to nftables and no one told me. I logged into my Linux web server the other day and realized the firewall rule set that had been hand crafted with iptables probably a decade or more ago is now completely gone. It probably…

  • Obsidian for Tasks and Lowering Blood Pressure

    Obsidian for Tasks and Lowering Blood Pressure

    I started creating tasks in Obsidian using the tasks plugin and at first it was amazing. It really helped me lower my stress levels because I knew that I could just write something down in my notes and Obsidian would remember it for me. I could quickly scan through my task list and make sure…

  • Obsidian for Notes

    Obsidian for Notes

    I’ve been using Obsidian to take notes and track all the action items in my life. I’ve really enjoyed it and even signed up for the paid sync service. I blame my sister Jen for this, because she’s the one who got me started with bullet journals. I journaled on paper for a few years,…

  • Home Improvement Landscaping

    Home Improvement Landscaping

    The previous owner of our property believed in letting nature run its course entirely without human intervention. As a result our front yard had been a long outstanding project that we’d been afraid to tackle. In addition, we had some serious drainage problems that led to standing water in the driveway, and sump pumps that…

  • 18 Years of Blogging

    18 Years of Blogging

    This blog has been alive in some form since 2002. As you can imagine a lot has changed in 18 years. The blog has moved physically from servers under desks, servers in closets, to finally virtual machines in the cloud. Even those VMs have changed AWS instance sizes and Ubuntu LTS versions over time. The…

  • Home Improvement Porch Project

    Home Improvement Porch Project

    Kat bought our house around the same time that I bought my condo in 2014, before we even met! It’s an amazing property on a large wooded lot with nice privacy and set back a bit from the street in a quiet neighborhood. The house had a great back deck with room for an outdoor…