Tris's Blog

Apps of all time

How to get bottom surgery in Boston, Massachusetts

Airport chapel notes

I was the bells

One month with Beeminder

Books I have been reading

thoughts about gender

some thoughts about gender and my sense of self

Late April updates

How to check out 496 ebooks in Libby at the same time: (if you live in Massachusetts)

Desaturating the desktop (grayscale mode) with Sway

How to deliver letters on paper for an Action Network letter campaign

Getting your supporters to send emails to legislators is great, but dropping paper on their desks can be even better! Here is a tool to help you do that.

a Jambalaya recipe

a dinner rolls recipe

Massachusetts Bodged Transistor Authority: How we turned MBTA Red Line equipment into a car speedometer

asr2geojson: a tool for making FCC Antenna Structure Registration data usable

how to plot nearly every antenna structure in the US on a map in (n) easy steps!

Using an ELM327 OBD-II interface on NixOS

Riding every commuter railroad operator in the Northeast Corridor

closing thoughts (Huntsville)

a personal piece about moving away from the city I lived in for seven years

toki sewi tawa mun

a prayer to the moon

Cycling in Alabama

References to a few Alabama Code sections and city ordinances that I find useful to have handy while cycling or planning a ride.

Using CloudFormation to create Athena tables

The correct CloudFormation YAML incantations to get an S3 data source showing up in Amazon Athena (backed by AWS Glue).

Huntsville local government-related project starmap

A list of projects I was once working on to keep track of Huntsville local government.

How I use Taskwarrior

Notes on my todo list workflow using Taskwarrior; future work.

TPM2-backed SSH keys on NixOS

How to set up and use a hardware-backed SSH key tied to your system in a NixOS environment.

2021 Advent of Code retrospective

Musings on the 2021 Advent of Code event: how I played, what I thought about the puzzles, my plans for 2022.

Creating a test CA using the Smallstep CLI

How to quickly bypass the usual safety checks when using the Smallstep CLI to get a CA up and running quickly.

Polycom provisioning notes

Notes on the XML format used to provision Polycom phones.

Debian, cloud-init, and Proxmox

Notes on making the Debian cloud images work in Proxmox.

My Pomodoro tool

How to install and use my MQTT-based Pomodoro system.

MikroTik point-to-point link packet loss and latency spikes

Why your 802.11 point-to-point link with a MikroTik device as client breaks periodically and how to fix it.

Windows IKEv2 client notes

Various notes on weird behavior exhibited by the built-in Windows IKEv2 VPN client.

How to change PowerShell remoting permissions

Changing your legal name in Madison County, Alabama

A detailed how-to guide on changing your legal name in Madison County, based on my experiences in September 2020 and kept up to date with feedback from the local trans community.

Pinning Debian packages to stable

Notes on using apt pinning to mix Debian packages from different distribution releases.

Office 365 SKU list

A link to Microsoft's product code / SKU list for Office 365.

Self-signed certificate for AD DS LDAPS

Notes on using a self-signed certificate for TLS-secured LDAP on an Active Directory domain controller.

Flask test client custom response wrappers

Notes on using a custom response class when testing Flask apps.