blog Fluent Bit Exec Plugin

Tags: fluent-bit analytics
After experimenting the other day, I continued thinking about better ways to solve my analytics problem. I did not really want to run a separate fluentd instance in a container just to use out_exec but I wanted to use same functionality. I decided to take an afternoon and see how difficult it would be to create a go output plugin and built fluent-bit-exec_out . graph LR nginx ---> |ltsv.*| fluent-bit fluent-bit --> |sematext.

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blog Experimenting With Analytics

Tags: nginx fluent-bit analytics
I’ve been using the self-hosted version plausible with my blog and development site. It generally works well, but there are times I’d like to have a little bit more customization on the reports. I’m already collecting nginx logs using ltsv and fluent-bit’s tail plugin. Since I have extra time to tinker over my winter break, I’ve been experimenting a bit. graph LR javascript ----> plausible nginx -->|ltsv| fluent-bit fluent-bit -->|forward| processing processing -.

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blog Online Handles

Through middle and high school I was in the Boy Scouts. Each Boy Scout Troop is broken up into patrols of several boys. Each patrol has a name, which was often something pretty generic when I was in scouts. Common examples would be animals or creatures like fox patrol, bat patrol, dragon patrol, etc. While sitting around a campfire one evening, a friend commented on how generic some of the names were.

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blog What’s in a (folder) name

Quite a long time ago (long enough ago I do not remember the original source) I read a blog post or poll about various folder names on the computer. I recently remembered it and thought about writing it down. Projects I believe when I was in university, they had us using Eclipse as an IDE to write Java code. By default, Eclipse defaulted to a ~/Projects folder, so for many years that has been my default directory for my own projects.

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blog Removing Distractions with DNS

Many sites are designed to snare your attention and keep you scrolling for as long as possible. This is often not particularly compatible with taking just a short break. Because so many sites are designed with patterns to hijack your brain, often we need to be proactive about not letting them get the initial hook. For a while now, I’ve been using DNS to help me out. A few months ago, I started using NextDNS to help me with that.

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blog GitOps for My DNS

Tags: gitops
I’ve used Namecheap for many years for hosting my DNS. It’s nothing particularly special but it works well enough for my needs. When managing DNS entries it can sometimes be a little annoying doing everything on their web page. I’d rather be able to script something. After thinking about it for a while, I finally created something. Namecheap’s API is implemented in XML which makes parts of it feel a bit old, but our use case is fairly simple.

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blog How Many Inboxes?

Tags: time-management pim
How many inboxes do you have? A few years ago I read a book Time Management for System Administrators which I sometimes summarize as “Don’t try to remember it, write it down”. Reading parts of Getting Things Done I also feel like I could summarize it in a similar way. Many of these systems have some concept of an Inbox for where tasks enter. One issue though is how many inboxes do you actually have ?

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blog Prototyping a Room Sensor

Tags: mqtt iot
Quite a while back I picked up a M5StickC Plus but had not done anything with it. I have a Smart Citizen Kit that I’ve been using to track data in my office and at home, but had been wanting some kind of smaller sensor that I could place in multiple rooms of my apartment. A few days ago I decided to pick up a ENV III Hat and TVOC/eCO2 to pair with it for a quick prototype.

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blog Growl and MQTT

Tags: mqtt

Many years ago before notification center, there was Growl . It was widely supported by many different MacOS applications, and had many nice customization options for the toaster popups. Eventually Apple released notification center and Growl slowly faded away, but I still appreciated the ability to send a remote notification and continue to use prowl for many of my projects.

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blog Rewrite for That Last 10%

One frustration of being a developer is becoming fairly opinionated on how one thinks things should work. When my family have tech issues, if they cannot figure things out in a short time, they will often accept it as-is and move on. Being a developer, I often experience an irrationally large annoyance and spend more time than I should trying to figure things out or trying to change things how I think things should work.

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