Update: One month after publishing this article, 1Password released its dedicated agent integration. Although the names sound alike, they address distinct issues. I have included a section explaining the differences between them further down. These days I run all my agents in ephemeral VMs on a dedicated VLAN, managed with Terraform and Ansible on top of …
The other day my friend Chris pinged me on a Twitter thread. Todd Dailey was making the case that digital signage is a huge industry selling bad products with high subscription fees, and that with a $40 e-ink ESP32 board you could just go build your own conference room signage with AI. Fair point. I’d add that the security posture across the industry …
A few weeks ago I wrote up the bash scripts I use to turn Ubuntu cloud images into Proxmox templates and clone them into VMs. The scripts work, but every time I went to spin something up I found myself re-reading the post to remember which env vars to set, which storage pool I’d picked, and which snippet file was the current “good” one. The …
I’ve been clicking through the Ubuntu installer on Proxmox since 2019 – I even wrote a note to myself back then about the dance. Partition the disk, pick a locale, wait for packages, reboot, SSH in, install the things I always install. Ten minutes per VM, every time. What finally pushed me to fix it was wanting ephemeral Ubuntu VMs for …
Digital sovereignty is becoming an increasingly hot topic, and people are starting to wake up to just how large the premium is for “cloud” versus simply running a few dedicated servers. For me, this is full circle – not in the technology, but in the operational model. I’ve been managing my own servers since I was running FreeBSD jails …
Long before ChatGPT, I was obsessively collecting health data. Blood work going back to 2018—some in PDFs, some in spreadsheets. On the device side, I’ve cycled through Whoop, Withings, and others, all feeding into Apple Health. Over the years it’s become the central hub for everything: heart rate, steps, workouts, sleep, body composition, blood …
In Part 1, I replaced ipgeolocation.io with a self-hosted Rust service in under two hours. That was just one piece of a larger pattern we’ve been following at Screenly. This is the story of DSLF—a project that started as a link shortener and evolved into a Linktree killer. The Link Shortener A few months ago, I got fed up paying for Rebrandly at …
We’ve all heard the saying that AI is eating SaaS. For some simple products, it’s certainly becoming true. At Screenly, we’ve been using ipgeolocation.io for a while. It’s a solid service, but at its core, it’s just a frontend for a GeoIP database. This morning, I saw yet another monthly invoice from them and decided to run an …
Over the last few days, I gave the sbomify website a much-needed overhaul. The previous iteration didn’t really reflect what we’re doing, especially as the product has matured. The new version leans heavily on diagrams to communicate concepts more clearly. For the past year, I’ve more or less standardized on d2 for diagrams. I’ve gone through the usual …
I recently wrapped up a consulting gig helping a client troubleshoot some gnarly PostgreSQL replication issues. What started as a “quick performance tune” turned into a deep dive through WAL checkpoints, replication slots, and the delicate dance of logical replication workers. Here are the war stories from the trenches, complete with the errors …