Notes

I just added a KVM console to my server rack, and it’s easily one of the best upgrades to my homelab I’ve ever made. Gone are the days of digging an old keyboard and VGA monitor out of a forgotten box somewhere in the basement just to regain access to a machine I’ve managed to lock myself out of, or to set up new hardware or a refreshed box. Now all I have to do is go downstairs, open up the console and switch inputs to the machine I need to access. It’s an old-school concept but it really does make a difference. ...

Two and a half years ago I was one of the earliest users of ChatGPT, and like most others I was amazed at what it could do, but right away I started dreaming up potential use cases that it was in no way ready to support. As I started testing ideas, the top of my wishlist read, “Run an LLM at home.” Not for any particular reason at the time, other than my love of self-hosting anything I could reasonably run locally. ...

AI is making my life very difficult these days. And no, this isn’t a rant about AI taking jobs; I’m talking about the Artifical Intelligence class I’m taking in school this semester. The class itself is very interesting, and the approach our professor takes in teaching is quite challenging, something that until now I’ve felt was largely lacking in other classes. On day 1 of the class we were given an assignment due in two weeks to come up with a topic of interest in AI research and learn enough about it to write a formal research proposal. The proposal had to include a description of some problem within an area of AI and the state of research into that issue, and a plan for improving upon existing research with a novel approach to solving the problem. (I’ll talk more about that project another time.) ...

I always have at least a few projects queued up or in progress, but recently I decided to get better organized with some personal project management. I installed Planka in my homelab and I’ve been filling it up with ideas, maintenance tasks, and issues for both homelab projects and house projects. Planka is essentially a Trello clone that’s missing a lot of Trello’s better features, but for now it’s where I’ve landed as it works pretty well and I’m hopeful that the project will stay active and keep adding features. ...

The next challenge I’ve decided to take on in my homelab journey is to replace one of my business’s remote servers hosted at OVH with a custom server hosted in my rack here at home. While technically this server will be separate from all homelab/non-production components, there is enough overlap that I don’t mind lumping it into the homelab category. After all, the primary purpose of my homelab is to support production in my business. ...

It’s no secret that digital assistants in 2023 are clunky and stale. Siri has lost its edge, while Alexa and Google Assistant were thrown at every wall to see where they might stick. Each of them responds to a limited set of instructions, making them only as useful as the number of commands one can memorize. While it’s clear that generative AI and digital assistants will converge at some point, I’m too eager to wait. ...

I pulled this from my code archives recently, a showcase component that I pieced together about 8 years ago or so for a client. I don’t even remember now what my inspiration was for this, just that I borrowed ideas from a few different tutorials to make it work. (Credit to you, whoever you are!) At the time I was quite proud of it because I had managed to cobble together a component in jQuery (which I was quite new to at the time) that not only worked, but it was responsive. I had to make some changes to it to get it working again, and I’m pretty sure there are a number of hard-coded values that were meant to make it properly fit the page where it used to live. ...

In the art of programming, style matters. If you’ve been programming for longer than five minutes, it’s a sure bet that at some point your eyes have glazed over while skimming source code longer than a “Hello, world” function. Reviewing someone else’s code, or even your own from some distant point in the past, often equals a long night and a large pot of coffee. ...

I’ve been building websites for over fifteen years. Twenty-five if you count the rudimentary attempt at inserting hyperlinks in Word documents when I was in grade school. Back then, I didn’t really understand how links (or websites for that matter) were made, but I thought I was cool just for making blue underlined text that opened Internet Explorer. (I also thought I was ahead of the curve using Windows’ Briefcase folders to sync files onto a floppy disk like I had somewhere to be. I’m pretty sure the disk just ended up in the back of one of those floppy organizers.) ...

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Or so they say; people often skip the first steps of a process, for better or worse. They also say that the best way to learn is to teach, and that is both the method and the secondary goal of learning in public: contributing to society’s collective knowledge from one’s unique perspective by letting everyone see both the process and the product of learning. ...