Recent content on Sam's Blog
Introduction I have Dispatcharr setup and it is amazing. Some sources I have come across have internet radio streams, including Sirius XM. I wanted an easy way to listen to this on my computer, and I wanted to know what was playing. As a continuation of my earlier post on coding with AI tools , I am breaking down the full process to create this app, from concept to ongoing support. Concept I…
Introduction I follow a lot of racing series from all over the world. Watching them is a huge challenge. Different time zones, different broadcast rights, this week on this channel, next week on that one, etc. Sometimes, theres no way for me as an American to watch, Super Formula before 2026 for example. There are Internet TV providers all over the internet. Some of them legal, some of them less…
Introduction I started to use Claude Code when Anthropic released Sonnet 4.0 and Claude Code was first released. I have used to to create some very cool things and they will all be getting a write up soon. From basic things like a Discord Birthday Bot or Notification Router to complex projects like a Video Game Tournamanet Manager or a AstroJS Based Recipe Website . It has been a blast to create…
Introduction I recently encountered an issue with a niche application accessed with Citrix Workspace. The company who provides this solution has specific requirements for the version of Citrix Workspace you use to access the software. There were 40 computers with various versions, paths, and settings that needed fixing. Doing this by hand would not be realistic. Luckily, this environment uses…
Introduction In part 1 , we went over the architecture and layout of the servers that host websites for me. As the servers come and go as needs require, creating new websites can be challenging. It also becomes very time consuming as you add more servers or roles to the cluster. The entire Github repo for this cluster is now public! You can view it or grab a copy here . Requirements An…
Introduction I have created a highly-available web hosting cluster, run completely by Ansible. Servers are created and deleted as needed, scalability provided by running this on Digital Ocean’s cloud. Common problems get noticed, and fixed, all without user intervention. This infrastructure is highly specialized and complex, and this post will help explain it. It will be required to…
Introduction Using various electronic parts, 3D printing, and some amazing software, I have created a DDU for racing video games. A DDU is basically a digital dashboard, replacing a classic gauge cluster. This one is powered by a program called SimHub, and a special display. SimHub comes with plenty of choices for dashboards, with more available online! Lovely Dashboard used in pics. Design My…
The Problem I got my first 3D printer in December, an Elegoo Neptune 4. The learning curve was bigger than expected but I got it setup and calibrated. I say calibrated but I mean kind of Calibrated. The printer would do some very weird things, without explanation: The Z Offset would change every time I turned the printer off. The number would stay but the printer would print very differently and…
Introduction I had someone reach out with a request. They needed to move thousands of pictures and movies from a business Dropbox account to a Google Drive account. They thought they would have to do this manually, item by item, and asked if I had any faster solutions. I used Rclone in the past for my Plex server and knew it could easily accomplish this task. The Plan All of the data we are…
Introduction If you record gameplay clips or stream, you might want to limit what gets broadcast or saved. In a standard setup, all sounds go to one audio device and everything is recorded in one audio track. With some lightweight software, we can split up our audio and gain a lot of control over it. With this setup, we can prevent discord voice calls, or music, from being recorded or streamed. We…
Introduction The theme-color meta tag. Full info on it can be found here. TLDR: It colors elements of your web browser like the address bar and or status bar. Adding it to all pages and post Adding a theme-color to all posts is easy for most hugo sites. For the Stack theme I’m using its extremely easy. You just create a custom.html file in the correct location and add your code. It them gets…
I use ansible EXTENSIVELY in my company. It is an open source IT automation engine that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and many other things. You create playbooks detailing how you want a computer to be setup, and Ansible makes it so. Playbooks are kind of like recipes, used by ansible to “bake” a computer how you want it.…
Introduction Using Aurora , and also sometimes OpenRGB , we can let games control your computers lighting. The only requirement is that your lights are plugged into your computers motherboard and not an external RGB controller. If you can change your PCs lighting/color with a button on your tower, this guide probably won’t work for you. Aurora Installing Aurora Aurora can be downloaded here…
Ubiquiti released a 2.5 Gbps Gateway recently and I got one to upgrade aging Cloud Security Gateway. With it, I can finally use the full speeds of my Xfinity internet package. It claims a speed of 1200 Mbps down but with over provisioning , I am seeing 1380 Mbps down and 200 Mbps up. I wanted to download from Usenet at these speeds, but as this post shares, that took some work. Unraid Filesystem…
Old Wisdom I have read and been told in the past that you should never let hard drives spin down. They always claim that if you let them spin down, they will fail faster. As I gained experience in IT I noticed that to not be the case. Mechanical hard drives spinning down or not had no affect on lifespan. Some systems used it, some didn’t, both had drives fail at about the same rate. When I…
My Old Setup I have used a DNS based ad blocker for years. I discovered the Pi-Hole project in early 2016 and used it until this year. I even contributed a little to both the main repository and its web interface . Being able to block Ads, Malware and other nasty stuff across my entire network is so handy. Having its own cache means that common queries are super quick and made things feel just a…
I created but never used a blog years ago. I am hoping to change that with this project. Keeping things simple and quick should help me post more frequently. About This Site It’s built using Hugo static site generator to power this website. A more complete writeup will be coming later but it turns basic markdown text files into a website. Deployed to Cloudflare pages for ease of use and…