Notes
Notes and experiments, ordered from newest to oldest.
18 published notes.
Building My Own Running Coach
Back in March, I wrote about Pacer, a small tool I built so I could stop sending screenshots to ChatGPT every time I wanted to review my training. Shortly afterward came nico://run, a site where I started publishing my runs, some stats, and…
My Cheap Chinese Scale Now Talks to Garmin
A while ago, I bought one of those cheap Chinese smart scales that work with an app called OKOK. The scale itself works perfectly fine, but the app is unbearable. Every time I wanted to weigh myself, I had to sit through an ad that…
One command to back up the whole homelab
For quite a while, creating a complete backup of my homelab meant following several separate procedures. There are hosts, virtual machines, containers and a few services that require their own specific steps. In some cases a standby instance needs to be synchronized first. In others,…
When a Tool Stops Being Experimental
A few weeks ago a concrete problem showed up at work: we had to publish and take down a banner in dozens of markets, at a specific time, inside Drupal. Doing it manually was possible. It was also exactly the kind of task that makes…
Redundant Internet on a Budget
The other day I started thinking about what would happen to my home setup if the fiber went down. If the home ISP disappeared for a few hours, I still wanted to be able to get in remotely to the servers, keep some Cloudflare tunnels…
Fifteen Years of Blur FM
Today Blur FM turns fifteen. On July 24, 2011, a web radio station started playing that, against all odds, is still on the air. The computers changed, the servers changed, the players changed, the design changed. Almost everything changed, except the core idea. Before Blur…
The Odyssey of Buying a Burger
Today I went in to buy a burger and ended up in a kind of digital obstacle course, one that seemed designed to measure how much effort I'd put in before giving up and eating somewhere else. First I went to the cashier, like always,…
The Migration That Seemed Hard and Ended Up in an Afternoon
On Heroku I had two internal tools set up to solve pretty specific things. They worked, did not give me headaches, and were already part of the day-to-day workflow, but the monthly cost was hard to justify for how small they were. The thing is…
A Second Life for an Old PC with Proxmox
I had an old PC gathering dust in a box in a corner of my room. For years it was my main machine: an AMD FX 8300, an ASUS motherboard, 16 GB of RAM, a Gigabyte 2 GB graphics card, and a pretty decent power…
Aires Pulse and a Transaction Between Pi Zeros
The other day I had an idea in my head: connect two worlds that already existed, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 Ws and my little personal sites. The idea was for one Pi Zero to generate information and the other to publish it. A kind…