Ideas, blog, etc.
I replaced OnlyOffice with Collabora in my lab. I was able to extend their WOPI example to produce a Minimum Viable Product . As it stands now, the software is feature complete for my use case. From there, I mount my data to my NFS storage and sync that folder with Dropbox. This lets me use a filebrowser for my currently in work documents. I can then access those contents from my reMarkable using…
I am thoroughly convinced that God still desires to pour out His Spirit into His chosen vessels as recorded in Acts 2:17–18, with the ultimate end being the salvation of souls (Acts 2:21). God’s purposes have not changed; He can empower His people so that He receives the glory through the lives that are transformed. While ministry today does not look exactly as it did in the first century, God…
Since August, I have been updating my digital life, which began with organizing my digital collection of books. I had never truly looked too indepth at Calibre before August 2025, but I am clearly blown away at its capabilities. I feel a bit awkward keeping the library on my desktop computer, but I have a script to periodically backup my home folder to my NAS. Today I finished organizing them in…
I think I had it all wrong when I accused OnlyOffice of sending data to the Russian goverment. This architectural design is called WOPI and was created for web applications that want to integrate with Microsoft Office. That means the architecture was really designed for the CIA to intercept a target's documents saved to Office 365. 1 I think good targets would asummably be those people who…
In my quest to replace Google Docs, I came across AbiWord, Gnome's editor. It looks newer than LibreOffice, appears feature complete, and has footnote support. The only problem is that it does not have keyboard shortcuts for footnotes. This is how I compiled AbiWord from the git source: Install the dependencies sudo dnf install gcc gcc-c++ make autoconf automake libtool intltool m4 pkgconfig…
Vibe coding is supposedly going to replace actual programmers. I can’t wait for it to go away. Robots have a terrible way of doing things, and they are not very good at writing code. That, however, has not kept me from regularly dabbling with ChatGPT and code generation. Programming is my hobby - not my livelihood. So when it comes to solving an personal issue with code, ChatGPT appeals to me. I…
The problem I have a few frustrations with Google Docs . It has gotten slow over the years. There is now a sudden push to migrate to Google Workspaces, which is something I do not want to do. There a few routes I can go in an endeavor to switch away from Google Docs. Web Options Office 365 Etherpad-lite Hedgedoc OnlyOffice Other various options that do not support footnotes Desktop Options…
Dear Google, I want a functioning product that is fast. That means I do not want to participate in your “simulate slowness experiments.” I use your product because I think it is good. You do not have to annoy me about trying your new Google workspace. If I want to try it, I will try it. When I dismiss your notifications, it means I have acknowledged your banner, read the contents, and do not want…
I have delayed switching away from Wordpress on my personal blog to something different for quite some time. I liked the new idea of a flat-file static html concept, but Jekyll did not appeal to me. Then, Hugo appeared on the scene and appeared to take the rightful place as the cool kid on the block. Hugo has a simple concept and drew my interest from being written in Go, but from my delay in…
I have been using GnuCash for personal finance since 2014. Two years ago, I switched over to a mysql backend because it was available in the flatpak. I never understood why the regular package on Fedora did not allow for opening a mysql database until today. On Fedora, GnuCash is bundled with weak dependencies. GnuCash does not need mysql support to run properly. It does not make sense to require…
ChatGPT4 has emotion now, and I asked it to write a song about everything being just OK in Oulunkylä (A neighborhood of Helsinki). I have visited there and one of the dentist's office signs declared itself to be an "OK Dentist," which prompted this massively incorrect song about the neighborhood. (Verse 1) Oh, the streets of Oulunkylä are so serene, Where the potholes are just a massage…
For most of my life I had to visit the optometrist yearly as my vision changed frequently, but as I got older, my eyes stopped degrading. For the last 5 years, I was on the same prescription, which is worth celebrating. However, I noticed a slight blur at a distance, and for the last 3 months, I just sort of lived with that new reality. At first, I was able to shrug it off and think that it was…
Next year I want to encourage my children to read the Bible through at least once. However, I found that most yearly Bible reading plans repeat reading the books of Psalms or Proverbs. Sure, that feature may make normal daily reading more enjoyable for adults, but extra reading is too much for children who have never read the Bible before. I wanted a plan for my children that would get them…
I recently switched my home setup from nginx to traefik . I had to get used to the new configuration styles and weird doc style of traefik , but suffice to say, I am happy at the end results. Traefik ships with SNI, allowing me to snoop the connection and prevent unauthorized access to my file server. (One must have the correct hostname to see my shared photos.) My first action was to replace my…
How do you repent from sin? How does one get all of their sins forgiven? These questions often fill the minds of those who have sin. Perform a search query on a popular web indexing service and you will find many interpretations of these questions. I was surprised at the results from the Church of Jesus Christ (LDS, Mormonism) and popular writings concerning Allah. They both came to the same…
The Zoom application has built in AI captions for various languages. It is great for those hard of hearing to read the words that are spoken. In other news, you can select the spoken language to be in Finnish, speak in English, and get wonderfully funny sentences in Finnish.
As AI tools are becoming more frequent, many have found interesting use cases. Some are using AI tools to publish children's books or other creative works primarily done by humans. However, when one publishes a work that was generated by AI, who is the author of the work? Should a notice be included or a sub author be added to the work that was derived from an AI tool? If two publish a…
This past week I have been able to traverse down the rabbit hole of personal tech debt. After a week's work, I think I was able to get to the bottom and give everything an updated timestamp! All kidding aside, here were some of the projects I was able to revisit: Kubernetes Cluster My k8s cluster hosts websites, internal applications, and personal projects. While many choose to host their…
I have been working on a personal project to organize my preaching illustrations. Whereas one could use a tool such as Notion, Evernote, or Obsidian, I have had a desire to keep my data in an easy to use interface. I should not have to spend 10 minutes to find that illustration I need. Plus, those services might charge me more than $3/month to access advanced features I may become dependent…
"I am right. Therefore, you must change." This is a common sentiment among anyone who holds an opinion. Major convincing arguments are then given as to reasons why others must change to your point of view. It is proud to assume that you have all of the right answers to everything. To make such a claim is to decree that you are like God: all-knowing and perfect in every way. However, any human…
Recently, I evaluated why I take time out of my day to read the Bible. I have heard that the Bible has one singular meaning. If that is true, then reading the Bible through once is sufficient. However, those that promote singular meaning also advocate for daily Bible reading. This seems like a logical fallacy, which should be addressed; nevertheless, I attempt to achieve at least one of these…
I just remembered how painful it was to share content through a blog to friends. Social media, such as Twitter, solved that issue. I do not want to attempt trying to remember my Digg.it password (Does the site even exist anymore?) Anyway, I said all of that to say this: I know where both of these locations are: https://yle.fi/a/74-20016727 I can be excited for both the US and…
After setting up an RSS reader and a bridge to pull in tweets, I no longer access Twitter. If there is interesting content, I click the link on my RSS reader and comment directly without visiting the Twitter homepage. If I were a more regular user of Twitter, I think I would use this extension: https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter I might even install it for the few times…
This morning I read from one of the people I follow a short, concise list of comparing Depression and Anxiety. It is quite good to read over , but I think it is quite lacking in its explanation. Primarily limited from the 280 character posts on Twitter. I feel like I have authority to speak on this subject because I am the son of a medically-diagnosed bi-polar manic depressive and my other parent…
It is very ironic - to me at least - that when I visit drive.google.com on a Chromebook, I am presented with a notification to install Google drive. This is a Chromebook. Google apps are loaded by default. This includes Google drive. I just prefer the web experience over the native file explorer.
The new year has already been dubbed by some in the tech world as the year of RSS, meaning people will ditch social media for the consumption-style RSS feed. It is the same concept of switching from a smartphone to a mobile phone. You might be thinking, "Why would anyone go backwards in technology?" Everyone may have their own reasons for doing so, but mine is simply because of the social media…
LastPass was recently hacked and the hacker was able to steal keys from a developer which had access to the company's backup files. In the backup files, the hacker could use the decryption keys he stole from the developer to create something like: somesite.com,<plaintext_username>,<hashed_password> I can assume my data has been leaked. I am a LastPass user; however, I do not think this is…
God became a man. He experienced life. A life without sin. He, unworthily, Received punishment for sin. God the Son had died. Three days have now passed. And Jesus did not stay dead He came back to life. It was His power. Without the help of others. Life came back to Him. By resurrection, Jesus says, “Place trust in me.” “I make all things new.” This event declares And even more loudly proclaims…
It is impossible to define a complex thought with one sentence. Even the previous sentence demands further information. What kind of thoughts do I mean? What is the reasoning for saying such a thing? Context adds further information to the reasoning behind such a statement. It also sets the stage for the real reason for the statement or provokes further thought. If one considers the previous…
As programmers develop new text generation methods, what can come as a result is interesting. Recently, ChatGPT responses have been propagating to Twitter, with many asking the AI text generator for common paradigms with known human solutions. Some posts have been insightful about how the chatbot was instructed to learn and associate words. However, to those who have programmed AI models, the…
The painfully slow death of social media is pushing the masses back into our blog-o-spheres. In 2 years, the only people doing social media will be those who are not technical enough to click a one-button wordpress/ghost install and pay $5/month from a hosting provider. Of course, there will be the faithful few who still insist that Markdown is the way to go. For now, I want to…
At first glance, the reMarkable seemed expensive for a one show pony. Replacing a pad of paper for notes was its only selling point and truly main focus. Could it really fit my use case and deliver an experience I needed? As one who regularly types notes and prints them for use in public speaking, I sought out a replacement for physical paper. I had multiple copies of notes, printed quite…
As Containers have progressed, Docker has stood out as the defacto standard. As many of the laggards are coming up to speed, Dockerfiles can be seen in many open source repositories. With the addition to that, I have seen a few repos with a Dockerfile-prod , Dockerfile-dev , Dockerfile-test , etc. Additionally, you find an IF clause in the CMD statement such as: CMD if [ "$REACT_NODE_ENV" =…
As a step further to my previous post, I have created a boilerplate for future WordPress projects. It can be accessed at https://github.com/andrewwippler/WordPress-Containerization-Boilerplate . To quickly start a WordPress environment, simply run the following commands: git clone git@github.com:andrewwippler/WordPress-Containerization-Boilerplate.git cd…
WordPress is amazingly popular considering how antiquated the file structure and code appears to be. Even still, it is the easiest CMS that I have used and the community has created plugins to make the copy-folder-for-a-new-theme/plugin at least tolerable. A challenge comes when one wants to use the 1990's method of serving web applications in a more modern way (such as running inside a…
I recently updated my kubernetes cluster from 1.10.2 to 1.11.0 . I noticed heapster was being deprecated and completely removed by version 1.13.0 . I thought this would be the perfect time to try out metrics-server. I had to download the git repo to apply the kubernetes yaml to my cluster. Since this is sometimes not as ideal as I would like, (I prefer kubectl apply -f http:// when it…
Jenkins-x appears to be the next big thing in CI/CD workflows - especially if you develop applications on kubernetes. There were a few tweaks I needed to do to set it up: I had to manually create Persistent Volumes (no big deal, below are what I have for my NFS share) apiVersion: v1 kind: PersistentVolume metadata: name: jenkins namespace: jx labels: app: jenkins spec: capacity: storage: 30Gi…
This is the script I use to change the DNS record of my home IP when it changes. I have it running once a week and have not noticed a lapse in coverage. If your ISP has DHCP configured correctly, you will receive the same IP address when you are due for a renew. Otherwise you need a script like the one below. #!/usr/bin/ruby require 'aws-sdk' require 'socket' def…
After I created a home kubernetes cluster, I immediately wanted to allow external access to pods/services/ingresses hosted inside the cluster. One must be aware that in bare metal environments, there is no receiver of an api call to create a load balancer. Since there is not a scriptable environment available to kubernetes, kubernetes cannot request external IP addresses or provision…
So I admit it - I am completely obsessed with Kubernetes. All of the web app/api deployment challenges in the past 20 years have been somewhat solved with the Kubernetes orchestration and scheduling platform. Kubernetes brings fault-tolerance, and Highly available systems if set up correctly (i.e. use a Kubernetes cloud installer). I enjoy having the power to write yaml and apply it to…
There is a God and He loves you . John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Everyone is a sinner and our sin separates us from the love that God wants to express toward us “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;” (Romans 3:23) “But your iniquities have separated…
I have not been posting as much tech stuff on my blog as I want to. The reason for this is I have been mulling about the idea of submitting my tutorials to a publication and get paid for my work. I still have not decided if this is the right course of action. Not that I have to explain myself with the readers of my blog - I just wanted something other than a Christmas post as my newest blog post…
Merry Christmas from the Wippler family! We pray that you are enjoying this season of celebration as we reflect upon our Saviour's birth. Truly, for the Christian, Christ is the focal point of the season. October was unusually mild and warm for Minnesota. Then on Friday, October 27, a snowstorm swept through our area dumping the highest one-day snowfall total ever recorded in Duluth since…
The day before thanksgiving, I was pondering an issue I was having. I was pinning a package to a specific version in my Docker container and the repository I grabbed it from stopped offering this specific version. This resulted in a container that Jenkins responded as being built correctly, but missing an integral package that allowed my application to function properly. This led me to believe I…
In order to add a user to a kubernetes cluster, we will need several things: kubectl, CA.crt and CA.key (found in your head node's /etc/kubernetes/pki folder), and openssl. First, create a private key for the new user. In this example, we will name the file employee.key: openssl genrsa -out employee.key 2048 Next, we will need to create a certificate sign request - employee.csr…
I recently had the need to populate a file in a docker container based upon whether or not the container is in production or development. I eventually came across confd which let me populate data in files based upon particular environment variables. While confd excels with distributed key value stores, my needs (and infrastructure) is at a much simpler level. Confd requires a few folders to store…
I was going through my articles I have collected over the years and found this little gem. The author is unknown. I AM THE FLAG OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA I am the flag of the United States of America. My name is Old Glory. I fly atop the world's tallest buildings. I stand watch in America's halls of justice. I fly majestically over institutions of learning. I stand guard with power…
It has been a month and a half since we moved, and we finally are on a set schedule. The girls have started school, all boxes are unpacked, our house in California closed escrow, and we have successfully adjusted to the CST time zone. It always amazes me how much God has blessed my family. We are all in good health, we are debt free, we have a roof over our head, and we have food to eat. I can…
(Note: This guest post is from my wife, Nicole. These are the events that happened July 25th, 2017.) After 6 hours of rest, we awakened rested (somewhat) and ready to resume our journey. Morning was fairly uneventful, and we were back on the road by 9. As we were fueling up, we realized that Clark's cup (which he went to bed with) was accidentally left somewhere amid the sheets despite going…