Articles and blogs
Pi in the Fire Service with Jesse Brennan
How the Volunteer Technologist podcast is made
I just published the September 2022 edition of the Indian Springs District Newsletter “Wanna build a catapult? You can at our camporee. Check out our latest #newsletter for details on this, trainin...
I just published the August 2022 edition of the Indian Springs District newsletter! “With one month of summer left, our district isn't slowing down even a little! In fact, you can even set sail wit...
I just published the May 2022 edition of the Indian Springs District newsletter. Check it out at https://www.indianspringsbsa.org/newsletter/2022-05-26-newsletter/
Crash Boom Bang: PoE & Lightning Strikes I just posted a new blog post about when lightning strikes and a PoE device doesn't initially come back. https://beanbag.technicalissues.us/crash-boom-bang/
I just published the March 2022 edition of the Indian Springs District newsletter https://www.indianspringsbsa.org/newsletter/2022-03-22-newsletter/
Starting Over with Home Assistant - Prep Time The other day I posted this question to Redit: “I’m seriously considering redoing my Home Assistant setup from scratch now that I know what we actually...
I bought and setup a leak sensor… but forgot to have it alert me if it detected water 🤦♂️ Here’s what happened and my new alerting system. https://beanbag.technicalissues.us/that-time-i-forgot-to-...
Temperature sensing for Jupiter Garage The other day I was listening to Linux Unplugged 441 and heard Chris mention how he wished he had a way to track the temperature in the garage where the serve...
Exploring Grafana “This weekend I decided to check out Grafana. My first test for it was setting up the Zabbix backend. This went much better than I had expected so I started looking at what other ...
Solving a WordPress ‘http error’ “Tonight we were trying to make the first post on my wife’s blog and ran smack into a “Http error” message. When I looked in the console of my web browser I found a...
Zabbix 3.2 is WAY more efficient! “Recently our Oracle DBA hit me up and said that all of a sudden some of his servers were showing a load average of 0.00, 0.00, 0.00. To diagnose this I started lo...
Saying Goodbye to dd-wrt “Tonight I had to wave a sad goodbye to dd-wrt and revert back to a stock firmware. This travesty is because the dd-wrt firmwaredoesn’t support the hardware NAT function on...
Node.js, CentOS7, and libhttp_parser.so.2 “Don’t you just love it when package maintainers break you blog? Yeah, me too. Tonight I went to post an article (no, not this one) and found my site to be...
Automatically Generate GoAccess stats “I’ve been using GoAccess to look at my logs for a while now. The other day I decided I wanted be able to look at these stats for the different sites on my web...
Python PIP Issues after Homebrew upgrade “This is just a quick note for anyone else out there who recently ran brew update && brew upgrade and then found that Python no longer worked as expected.” ...
The Road To Puppet 5 “Not long ago Puppet released version 5 to the open source world so, naturally, it was time to start updating all my projects to be compatible with it.” https://beanbag.technic...
Dual Booting Macos High Sierra And Linux Mint “This is a step-by-step walkthrough for dual booting a MacBook Pro (Mid-2015 aka MacBookPro11,5) that already has macOS High Sierra on it with Linux Mi...
Breaking Up A Large Pull Request “Ever finished up all the changes for a pull request on GitHub and realized it was just too big to review easily or to reason about what’s going on? I had just this...
Reclaiming Your Accounts “This post is a quick reference guide for what I recommend people do when someone has gotten into their accounts on various platforms.” https://beanbag.technicalissues.us/r...
Fixing Vagrant’s box index “I use Vagrant a lot and sometimes things on my laptop get moved around or deleted by means other than vagrant destroy. The problem with this is that when I later run vag...
Fixing powerline in homebrew’s vim “For the last few days I have been trying to figure out why, all of a sudden, powerline has stopped working in vim.” https://dev.to/genebean/fixing-powerline-in-h...
OpenTelemetry Part 1: Sinatra “OpenTelemetry (aka OTel) is becoming the standard for distributed tracing. This is the first in a multi-part series where I will document my trials, tribulations, and...
Burnout Sucks “My favorite personal project is an application called PiWeatherRock... or it was before I dove in head-first working to update it and create a community for it’s users. Tons of enthu...
OpenTelemetry Part 2: Redoing Instrumentation “For part two of my journey in using OpenTelemetry (Otel) with Sinatra I am replacing my Lightstep instrumentation with the OTel version. Besides updat...
OpenTelemetry Part 3: v0.6.0 gems and VMPooler “For part three of my journey in using OpenTelemetry (Otel) with Sinatra I am upgrading to the 0.6.0 release of the OTel gems to get many new features...
My journey to securing sensitive data in Puppet code “Dealing with secrets and sensitive data in Puppet is daunting, right? Nope, not at all. Let me show you how to do it. I've wrapped my head arou...
Using the multi-resource declaration and defined types to simplify manifests “Sometimes it seems you just keep repeating the same block of code with only one or two lines changed. Sometimes a singl...
De-forking a Puppet module “A couple of years ago, the team I’m on forked a Puppet module called "mrepo" that is used for creating and managing RPM-based repository mirrors. We recently had an issu...
Puppet Camping in place: East meets West “I pitched a tent at Puppet Camp a couple of times before joining the company and have to say that last week’s event was superb, and it more than lived up t...
Leave the CDs in the Office “There are few things more aggravating than going out to a coworker's office to work on their computer and finding that to fix it you need a CD that is sitting in your o...
TurnKey Linux “Ever wanted to instantly have Drupal, Moodle, OTRS, MySQL, WordPress, Zimbra, Bugzilla, phpBB or a slew of other open source software packages up an running in a hassle-free manner t...
Using Linux to Disinfect Windows “Are you responsible for one or more Windows computers? If yes then the odds are really good that you have had to deal with cleaning viruses and malware. Did you kn...
2 Computers via 1 Keyboard & Mouse “Do you have multiple computers on your desk? Is one of them a laptop that is sat off to the side a bit? Have you ever wished that you could get rid of all but on...
Centralized Logging with a Web Interface “Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a web interface to the logs on your central log server? Well, dream no more because this one is a reality thanks to LogAnaly...
Linux Mint Debian Edition Released “Linux Mint has just released their new distribution: Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). It is a rolling distribution based off of Debian Testing instead of Ubuntu...
Setting the Resolution in an X-less VM “Ever been working in a VM that is command line only and wished it wasn’t so small? Well, that was how I felt constantly until now. Step on past the break to ...
Tracking Server Uptimes “Unlike some other OS's, Linux almost never has to reboot… or so I was told when I first started learning about it. To illustrate the point, my mentor introduced me to an ap...
I’ve started a blog series about my Home Assistant setup. The first post is entitled “Introducing My Home Assistant Setup” https://beanbag.technicalissues.us/introducing-my-home-assistant-setup/
Published the November edition of our newsletter https://www.indianspringsbsa.org/newsletter/2021-11-11-newsletter/
Published the October 2021 edition of our district newsletter: https://www.indianspringsbsa.org/newsletter/2021-10-19-newsletter/
I cross-posted an article I wrote last year to Church Bytes tonight as it was the inspiration for the blog in the first place: Church and COVID-19
Church and COVID-19 “My church has been streaming our service for several years and has been live on a local FM station since before I became a member. I setup streaming initially and have been inv...
The Ghost Lives There's a ghost in my blog... or maybe my blog is in a ghost... you decide. https://beanbag.technicalissues.us/the-ghost-lives/
And thus begins the existence of The Comfy Seat.