Recent content on Aaron Ogle
It’s hard to believe I’m writing this. After nearly 10 years at Rocket.Chat, I’m saying goodbye. What started as just a guy on the internet submitting pull requests to fix image stretching… Turned into a decade of building across multiple cloud platforms, traveling the world, meeting/working with great people, making friends, leading teams, and learning A Lot . I want to…
2024 is now in the books! In previous years, I wrote internal posts at work to reflect on the year and highlight accomplishments. This exercise was revealing. It was often a great way to see how much we’d achieved that you might lose sight of in the daily grind. This year, I decided to apply the same reflection to my personal life. Here’s a TL;DR of 2024: Personal Life A Year Free From Caffeine…
This post is mostly as a resource for future me. But maybe it’ll come in useful to someone else. This weekend I was working on provisioning a new NAS/Media box setup after having to do a bit of hardware shuffling. Long story. I decided to try Fedora iot on a whim. Fedora iot has an interesting project called greenboot . The objective of the project is to define some checks for the state of…
Are you looking to add an extra layer of security to access Rocket.Chat? One way to do this is by implementing client SSL certificate authentication. This authentication method requires clients to present a valid SSL certificate to authenticate themselves to the server. In this post, we will walk through the steps to set up client SSL certificate authentication using Nginx. Prerequisites A server…
Our adventure begins on a Monday evening. I received a call from a family member that lives a bit over 8 hours away. I powered on my laptop today and it won’t take my password Unfortunately the laptop runs Windows 10. I have made it a point to not use windows and haven’t for last several years. Primarily using linux or osx. Leaving me at a bit of a disadvantage. So then I did what any…
Rocket.Chat now has federation support via the Matrix protocol . This announcement is an exciting one to me. I’ve been working with Rocket.Chat since I found it almost 7 years ago. One of the things I recall from early on is the vision of being as ubiquitious as email. One of the beauties of email is not everyone is on the same domain or let alone even the same kind of mail server. Just all…
Finally a more eventful update! Last time I worked with building parts in CAD I was using solidworks or AutoCAD. I have no desire to buy either one of those right now plus I need something that will run on linux. So started investing some time into learning my way around FreeCAD. Creating first iteration of the wheel 50mm radius for a 10cm/100mm diameter wheel 3mm thick Based on the specs of the…
So the robot parts sat in my closet for a few months. I kind of forgot to order the parts. Recently realized I really need to disconnect more fully from work in my off hours. When your hobby includes coding and in same language as you write for work.. Its a bit harder to keep your brain from making that jump to thinking about work. So i’ve been on the look out for new hobbies. I don’t…
Parts came in! Finally got time to work on it again. We wired everything up. We gathered up some cardboard. We found something to trace and cut out 4 wheels. (you’ll notice this is defintely a deviation from the original sketch. But this was insisted on once the additional motors were spotted). We also put together the transmitter on another breadboard Now if you do electronics seriously at…
My family is very STEM oriented. I grew up learning hands on at home. Taking things apart. Questioning how things worked and eventually learning how to actually fix those things I took apart. As much as possible we’re trying to encourage this for our kids. They are pretty fortunate as they have good examples of this on both sides of the family. So they come by their curiousity about the…
Its been a while since I’ve worked with physical servers and typically when something happened I could pretty quickly get physical access to the box if things went pear shaped. But when you buy or lease servers from a provider like OVH. Those servers might be sitting half way around the world. So if something goes wrong you need to some how virtually be in front of the keyboard. OVH has a…
Recently have had to work with a number of physical servers that need to be treated more cattle like than a bunch of pets. I need to be able to quickly and easily provision servers to fit a specific role with out having to go through a complicated setup process. For this type of thing PXE or iPXE comes to the rescue. Allowing you to boot over the network. Simply rebooting the machine and then…
This last couple of weeks I finally took some time off of work to try and reset. I’m not always the greatest at taking time off. I take an extra day or two combined with the weekend for a mini-vacation around the Holidays to see family and it’s often the minimum time needed. This year with everything going on really had to force my self to step back and try to reset with a staycation. It’s all too…
Surprisingly I don’t have a lot of kubernetes related content on my blog yet. This might just because I’m too busy using it to talk about it. But i’m a heavy user of it. To me it just makes orchestrating work loads easier. One thing in general I don’t see a lot of talk about is migrating between infrastructure. Especially don’t see much for kubernetes. So I wanted to share a high level concept set…
I don’t think its likely a surprise to anyone if I say I’m typically an introvert. I stay at and around home a lot in general. But when its no longer by choice.. kinda takes the fun out of it. We identified early on that we needed to keep our selves busy and entertained. Started out the quarantine with me teaching my wife to play chess. So pulled out the ‘ol Mario chess set . Yes its awesome! I’ve…
There is a reason why people tend to add analytics to sites. I’d say most people add for completely honest reasoning. They just want to be able to see how their site is doing and if anyone actually shows up. But its really important to go down the path with caution. If you dont carefully select and think through your analytics… You end up spying on your users likely without even realizing…
I wrote a bit about my reasoning to De-Google here . Now I want to write a bit about my progress, the struggles and what I ended up with. Search Or Google as many think of it. This one I have toyed with off and on with over the years. But a while back probably around a year ago.. I was listening to a podcast. I think either Ask Noah Show or one of the Jupiter Broadcast Linux podcasts and was…
This is not by any means a new idea. A quick search around the web will return many results of people doing this. My reasons are likely similar to many others. Privacy being the most common shared reason. Ok that’s it I spoiled it! Now you don’t need to read on 😜 But I’ll explain anyways. Privacy Google gives their applications and services away for free. This is extreeemly…
Hacking is often a term used to mean malicious behavior. But I believe hacking is a mindset. It’s about trying to be creative.. Taking things and making them work in a different way. It’s about not letting your self be your own limiter. Just because you’ve never done something before… doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. I don’t consider my self good at carpentry. Or…
Hello its me again your friendly neighborhood Geek Gone Crazy.😜 Its been a bit less time since my last post than normal. Recently I came across a challenge on mastodon to do a 100 day writing challenge. Inspired by the 100 days of code. The idea being much like 100 days of code it encourages a person to sit down to write more often. Of course by doing this you get better at it. As you can see…