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Hey, I'm Levi. I currently live in Hurricane, WV with my wife and our two miniature dachshunds. I write code for a living and for fun. I'm an amateur radio o...
In order to keep this project under my very low budget of $100, I decided to use only VPS. There are a few VPS providers that offer BGP sessions, but I'm primarily using Vultr and Xenyth for AnyCast. Using a VPS provider for AnyCast limits our ability to pick IP transit. But IP transit is expensive. And when you want a presence all over the world, it's insanely expensive. These providers have…
It was 2012 and I was the head of the web department at a local small ad agency. My friend from IRC told me about a company who rented VPS with a dedicated IP and root access for $5 a month. And, it only took 60 seconds to spin one up. This was nuts! I was getting a dedicated IP and root access in under 60 seconds. It usually took Nic Cage that long to boost a car. That same year I discovered a…
Envelope Encryption is something I think is important when developing an application that saves user data. The user is trusting you with their data and you shouldn't take that responsibility lightly. Running a database server on a VM with an encrypted disk isn't enough. The idea is pretty simple. You generate a Data Encryption Key (DEK) and use it to encrypt the user's data. Then you encrypt the…
I typically run an Ansible Hardening Playbook on any new Linux installation. After that, there are a few more things I do. For SSH, I'll make sure password authentication is disabled root user is denied no X11 forwarding no keyboard-interactive auth is enabled restrict SSH to a specific username If it's a VM, I'll also make sure I allow only my IP access to port 22. I also typically install…
It seemed like everyone went wild over MCP when it first came out. There was lots of videos on YouTube that glorified the FOMO of not using an MCP. I couldn't understand what everyone was excited about. It sounded like an API. After doing some digging, I realized it was alot like an API. Then I read more and I realized it's more like fancy SOAP , but it uses JSON. I do like JSON and I don't like…
I'm a fan of the 1-liter PCs. I have three of them and I recommend them all the time. They're great! The ones I get come with 16gb memory, ssd, and an i5. I bump them up to 32gb ram and add a 2tb nvme drive. They're capable of handling whatever I throw at them. Claude and I have been working together on some projects, alot lately. But, my computer has to be in bed by 8pm even though Claude still…
I was bangin on my mechanical keyboard in the FreeBSD 4.7 terminal in the early 00s. GUI? Not on my 486. Reading man pages trying to figure out how to turn the thing into a router. Using BitchX in the terminal of my other computer running Slackware to ask my pals for help. Dual-booting? No way, that's for people with commitment issues. Reading my 2600 while drinking some jolt cola with Hackers…
As with many of the projects I start, and often abandon, this one was created from the lack of solutions that do exactly what I want. taskd handles my wild imagination with ease, it keeps track of every whim and wish. Sometimes, I put the same thing in there more than once. It's easy for me to prioritize what I want done, group tasks with labels, and even assign tasks to Claude. There are still a…
There is no shortage of task management services, but I've never liked any of them. Notion, way too complicated Trello, too big Google Tasks, not bad Obsidian Tasks, meh Okay, maybe there aren't many, but I don't like most things I don't build. I tend to build projects thinking I could do a better job only to realize it's more difficult than I thought. Failure hasn't stopped me yet! Today, I would…
tl;dr use the Claude Pro plan for Claude Code. I thought using API tokens for Claude Code was the smart thing to do. Well, maybe it is for other people, but it isn't for me. I was totally aware of the amount of money I was spending, but I didn't realize that I didn't have to be spending the money. If you have a Claude Pro plan, just use that with Claude Code. If you run into session limits,…