Recent content on lifewaza
In the last article in this series, I got caddy up and running and told it about all the services I wanted it to know about. Now I need to setup the mapping between the names (grafana.lifewaza.com) and the IP address where caddy is running (192.168.1.10). Since I run a local DNS resolver ( unbound ) I can just add entries to it’s configuration file ( /var/unbound/etc/unbound.conf ) for each…
The encoding finally finished! [20:44:04] Finished work at: Thu Aug 6 20:44:04 2026 [20:44:04] libhb: work result = 0 Encode done! HandBrake has exited. Took about 7 days to encode 56 DVDs from VIDEO_TS folders into more modern .mkv format, using H.264 to save on space. It looks like the .mkv files are quite a bit smaller than the source material: $ du -sk */ | awk '{s+=$1} END {print 'Original…
I used to have a problem buying DVDs. If I saw one that was under $10.00 that I liked (or sort of liked, or had heard of, or thought looked cool) I’d buy it. Too cheap not to buy! My taste in movies is questionable (I’m ok with this) so I’ve amassed a decent collection of 80s action movies mixed with sci-fi, fantasy, and eclectic indie films (like Bubba Hotep ). As a card…
The first step on my homelab improvement journey is setting up a reverse proxy. What’s a reverse-proxy? A reverse proxy is a server that sits in front of your other servers. Instead of sending requests directly to the server where the application is running, you send them to the proxy and it proxies your request to the real server. It’s called a reverse proxy because a…
Introduction # My home network is a bit of a mess. I’ve got multiple services running on multiple machines, and everything is IP addresses and ports. I don’t have any DNS resolution going on internally so I just keep a bunch of IP addresses in my head. I’d like to clean that up so that I can have internal names for things so that instead of typing an IP address plus a port…
Introduction # This is the penultimate post in this series. I have a feeling that we’re getting into the “very comfortable” realm for OpenClaw with the Raspberry Pi 400 . This unit has 4GB of RAM and a 1.8Ghz quad-core Cortex-A72 processor. Install Raspberry Pi OS # As usual, I installed the 64bit Lite version of Raspberry Pi OS and booted up the Pi. Install OpenClaw # Follow the…
I’m finally getting around to trying OpenClaw again on slightly beefier hardware than the Pi 3 I used previously. I’m trying to show that you don’t need a $500.00 Mac Mini to run OpenClaw, all you need is a $60.00 Raspberry Pi that you probably already have 1 . Install Raspberry Pi OS # For this test, I’m using the Pi4 with 2GBs of RAM that’s living inside my Mycroft…
This post is another side quest in the “You Don’t Need a Mac Mini to run OpenClaw” series. When I was first looking for alternatives to OpenClaw , I ran across the PicoBot project and bookmarked it for later. While I was struggling to get OpenClaw up and running on my Pi 3b+ I found PicoClaw , which I confused for PicoBot as both projects are written in Go and both aim to be…
In my first post of this series I installed OpenClaw on a Raspberry Pi 3b+ . It didn’t go too well, but I mentioned that I wanted to see if one of the other less resource-hungry Claws could run on it. I kept the same Raspberry Pi OS Lite install that I used for OpenClaw, but disabled the OpenClaw gateway since it was eating up all my RAM. Then I needed to install Go : sudo apt install golang…
Introduction # In this series, I’ll explore running OpenClaw on things that aren’t a Mac Mini, as well as exploring some alternatives to OpenClaw. You don’t need a Mac Mini to run OpenClaw 1 . OpenClaw is a NodeJS app that shouldn’t use up too many system resources. It should run pretty well on limited hardware like the Raspberry Pi 3b+ that’s sitting in my closet…
I wanted to play around with OpenClaw, but didn’t want to install it directly on my computer. I’m running Fedora 42 on this laptop and it comes with a virtualization app called “Boxes” which lets you create virtual machines (VMs) running just about anything you need. I downloaded the .iso for Ubuntu 25 from the Ubuntu website and installed it onto a fresh VM. I provisioned…
I’ve been hearing a lot about LoRaWAN and Meshtastic over the past few years. It’s basically a decentralized peer to peer radio network that allows you to communicate w/out the internet or cell phone towers as long as you are within range of a node. There aren’t any nodes out near where I live, but I wanted to play around with the tech so I ordered a LILYGO T-Deck Plus with…
Immich is a really nice photo management application that you can host yourself. I’m currently running it on my JankyNAS via the TrueNAS Apps Market . That’s a discussion for another post, but TrueNAS makes it really easy to try out a bunch of open source applications with minimal configuration. I originally found Immich while looking to say Goodbye Google . Though I haven’t…
At some point around when browsers started getting tabs, I stopped using bookmarks . I’m not really sure why, I don’t think it was a concious decision, but it’s a fact that I rarely reach for the “bookmark this link” button even though it’s sitting right there next to the URL entry box. I use tabs kind of like a short term memory… I keep stuff open while…
Lobste.rs is doing a blog carnival , and the topic is “What have you made for yourself? You wouldn’t recommend it, because it’s not useful to others?” I’ve got a few programs that I’ve built for myself, that are pretty niche, here are 3 4: xmpp/slack/local chat bot # My XMPP/Slack/Local chat bot . I started this at work back in 2014 with two of my coworkers. We took…
One of my xbox controllers always drifts. It’s as if you’re pushing up on the joystick all the time, even if you’re not. I’ve tried all easy troubleshooting steps outlined here , updated the firmware, recalibrated the joystick, blown compressed air into the joystick, and nothing worked. I also opened the controller case, to better clean around the joystick, but no luck…
In Québec we have a fine portal for scheduling appointments for routine medical work. I use it for scheduling blood tests that I need to get quarterly, but you can also use it to schedule all kinds of things . In any case, once you find an available slot, you fill out the information and it helpfully sends you a text message reminder as well as an .ics calendar invite. Every time I try to import…
Date # 2025-08-20 LLM # ChatGPT 4o Problem # I’m having difficulty connecting to a PostgreSQL instance deployed by the Percona Operator for PostgreSQL in a k8s cluster. I’m able to connect with the psql command line client as well as DBeaver and DBGate , but not with PGAdmin . When I attempt to connect with pgadmin, I see the following errors: connection failed: connection to server at…
LLM # ChatGPT o4 Problem # I needed to route some traffic out my firewall via my wireguard VPN in order to reach my minecraft server that’s hosted on exaroton . Prompt # I actually used the first part of my blog post about minecraft hosting as the prompt for this, but to test it in the future I’ll use: How can I forward Minecraft connections from my home network to Exaroton servers…
Update - I found where this is mentioned in the OpenBSD docs, it’s in the package readme for PHP! https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/lang/php/files/README-main?rev=1.18&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup see the section “Making network connections.” I knew I had seen this somewhere, but couldn’t remember where. I recently moved my FreshRSS install from Janky NAS…
Date # December 3, 2022 LLM # ChatGPT GPT-3.5 Problem # I wanted to access homeassistant data in grafana for vizualizations. Transcript # Unfortunately the transcript of this interaction has been lost to history. I’m not sure if I deleted it, or maybe wasn’t logged in to ChatGPT at the time, so I can no longer find it. The only evidence I still have is that I posted in #devious about…
Since there’s no easy way to share conversations from deepseek, I asked it to dump a markdown formatted transcript so that I could reproduce it here. I asked it to only include my prompt and it’s output, excluding it’s thinking process. I’ve added some notes inline below. User Prompt: # How can I connect my home assistant instance to my grafana instance? Assistant Response:…
I’ve been using LLMs since the hype started, and overall I find them pretty useful for a lot of things, but when I run into a problem that I don’t already know how to solve, they have a tendency to lead me astray. This series will collect examples of issues I’ve had as well as the transcripts of my interaction with various LLMs (when available). I won’t redact the…
A somewhat up to date list of the open source software I use regularly. I’m an open source developer so I’m always prioritizing and looking for open source software to meet my needs. I try to update this list every few years. Hero image and thumbnail from the official OpenBSD artwork collection . OpenBSD # This is the foundation of all my computing requirements. I use OpenBSD on my…
This is the first post in a new category “Debug Logs.” Usually, when I run into a problem with my computer I start a file like this one, where I describe the problem and then start researching what the issue might be. These won’t be as polished as my regular posts, since I don’t really know what I’m doing as I’m trying to figure out the problem. 2025-01-06 #…
me # I’m a computer nerd, martial artist, and dad who likes reading, growing stuff, and playing with his kids. I live in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. lifewaza # lifewaza is the melding of the japanese word “waza” meaning technique, and the english word “life” meaning, well, in this case, meaning living, so literally “living techniques” or “techniques on life” or perhaps most correctly,…
I’ve been hosting minecraft servers for my kids since around 2019. First on my OpenBSD home server for local play, and then on Shockbyte for ease of playing with friends. Overall the minecraft hosting experience on shockbyte has been pretty great, but I recently discovered Exaroton and they have a feature that lets you only spin up your minecraft server when you’re using it…
Introduction # I have a small problem with crowd funding, I like it too much. A few months ago I saw this neat project on Crowd Supply for a presence sensor based on mmWave radar . I don’t currently have a huge need for presence detection, but couple that with the optional climate sensors and the fact that it integrates easily with Home Assistant and I was sold. I ordered 4 devices, two with…
Once upon a time, I was playing with a hard drive magnet that slipped out of my hand and landed on my laptop, directly above where the spinny hard drive was housed. My laptop had been playing some music just before this happened, and immediately stopped. I knew what I’d done almost before I noticed the problem and my initial reaction was “oh shit.”. This was back before the SSD…
I’ve been playing with ansible off and on for several years now, usually in fits and starts. Ansible is a tool for managing computers. It lets you do things like setup a new web server in exactly the same way you setup your old web server, or make sure that your new laptop has all the software you routinely use installed, or configure a cluster of computers identically regardless of their…
I’ve been wanting to grab a PINEBOOK Pro since I first heard about it a few years ago. The PINEBOOK Pro checks all the boxes I care about when considering hardware: Prioritizes open source Runs Linux/BSD/etc Small Solid build quality Replaceable parts It’s a solid little laptop and is perfect for my use cases: Programming Writing blog posts SSH’ing to servers to do stuff Playing…
I’m an open source developer. What does that mean to me? Prefer open source software # I always prefer open source software. If no open source software exists to do what I’m trying to do, see the next point. If the software doesn’t exist, create it # If there’s no software available to do what I’m trying to do, it’s my job to create it. Contribute to open source…
I’ve been playing with home automation for a few years now and wanted to stop relying on 3rd party cloud software for the devices I run at home. I also wanted to stop connecting my IoT devices to my wifi in order to control them. In order to do this, I needed a zigbee or z-wave hub. One of my friends has a hubitat elevation and recommended it it to me so I ordered one to try it out. First…
What do I need this for? # The lights in my duck house aren’t quite bright enough to cover the space adequately. The duck house is also a high humidity, high dust environment. We currently have 19 chickens and 10 ducks sleeping in there (they free range during they day). Before getting these, I was using two Lifx BR30 bulbs which overall worked fine, but had a few drawbacks: They are wifi…
As part of my move away from cloud based IoT devices I’ve been looking for a zigbee switch I could use to automatically turn the lights in my duck house on and off. I got the hubitat on a recommendation from a friend and managed to find these zigbee toggle switches that should work with it. After spending a few hours rewiring some of the electrical in the duck house (I’m not an…
I’ve been a gmail user since it first came out, and I used to be a fan of google, but now I find myself more and more concerned with their data gathering practices. I’ve decided to move all of my personal services off of google onto open source self hosted alternatives. This page will act as a checklist for each of the services I’m able to get off of. Each of the links below will…
I had an interesting problem at work the other day. We’d hired some external contractors to build an android app for us, and now we needed to get the code from them and into our private GitHub. The problem was, I couldn’t quickly get them access to the repo since there’s a fair amount of process involved in getting those approvals. They also didn’t have enough seats to add…
Once upon a time, if you wanted to connect to the internet (or even to your local network) you needed to edit a bunch of files, ask your system or network administrator for an IP address, and hope you didn’t mess up your computer too badly since you didn’t know what you were doing. Today, you just plug in your Ethernet cord, or login to your wifi network and you’re good to go.…
If you do code review, you likely come across the same issues over and over again. People who are contributing to your code base for the first time may not know your team’s internal standards, they may come from a different language and do things slightly differently. A new hire may need to get up to speed quickly on submitting changes to your repository. How can you make sure these cases…
DNS is basically the address book of the internet. When you type www.duckduckgo.com into your browser, the computer needs to figure out how to get your request to the right server. Routing over the internet works via IP addresses, so to get to www.duckduckgo.com , you first need to figure out what its IP address is. This is where DNS, the Domain Name System comes in. At a high level, when you hit…
I had the pleasure to work with Cathy Axais when I was a team-lead at Seedbox. She had the unenviable task of being the sole Quality Assurance resource at the company for a team of 30 developers. There was no way she would have been able to keep up with the QA load placed on her if she tried to perform the traditional Dev -> QA -> Production cycle; she needed a way to scale. What did she do? She…
Everyone has some idea of what their ideal job would look like. Unlimited vacation, respect, a company car, power over your destiny, meaningful work, etc. Most of us probably don’t currently work at our dream job and so we hop around looking for a better deal. I try to mold my current job into the job I want it to be. What are some examples of what I mean? Several companies ago I was working…
I ran into a gap in my understanding of git and merge commits yesterday. Most of the time, the projects I contribute to work with a “mergeless” commit history, so we usually rebase+squash our changes into a single commit and apply those to master leaving us with a commit history that looks like: 1---2---3---4---5 master Generally, if I need to revert commit 3, all I need to do is git…
Someone at work recently pointed me towards PlantUML , a really neat tool that takes a simple textual description like this: me -> you: Say 'Hello' you ->me: Say 'Hi' back me -> you: Ask 'Do you like cookies?' you -> me: Reply 'Of Course!' And turns it into a nice diagram, like this: It supports a wide range of UML and non UML diagrams (sequence, class, state, object, etc) and is fairly easy to…
I’ve been “on the net” since 1997. A lot has changed in that time, and a lot has stayed the same. I’ve tried blogging platforms with bells and whistles, but always come back to simple hand-edited pages. I think, now I’ve found the best system that works for me. Staic site generators that allow you to write in markdown using the text editor of your choice, and then…
I briefly mentioned arcanist in a previous article. It is a command line tool that wraps around git, hg, and svn and provides some handy features for working on a shared codebase. It is meant to be used in conjunction with phabricator , and all my examples assume that situation. As I mentioned previously, a typical workflow while using arc might look something like this: Create a local branch git…
Update - After calling Nest support, they replaced my unit for me, no charge. The new unit arrived and has been sitting in it’s place, behaving properly for a week now. We’ll see how long it lasts. Fingers crossed. After about six months of faithful service, the Nest Protect ended up with all the other less intelligent smoke detectors: On the table with the batteries out. Let me back…
I’ve started implementing code review before commit/push on my team. We theoretically had a code review system in place before this, but it went something like this: Write code Commit code Push code Roll a d20 If die came up greater than 2, no one will review your code. Otherwise, someone tries to retroactively review a billion commits in 30 minutes. That process wasn’t really the best…
Update - A reader pointed out that the intel i5-4250U Processor only has 2 cores and not 4. I’ve changed the article to reflect that. It has 4 “threads” and so the OS sees 4 processors, but in fact it only has 2 cores. Thanks to Jeff for pointing that out. While shopping around for a small form factor PC, I came across the Intel NUC . It was the machine our IT department had…
So, in a previous post, Continuous Integration I gave a quick overview of our continuous integration setup, and mentioned that I’d like to explore allowing jenkins to push our deploys for us. That work is now done. The basic workflow is now: Developer develops new feature Developer runs unit tests locally Developer submits patch for code review via Phabricator Code is approved by another…