A tiny S3 proxy in front of a pool of Drive accounts
I had ~50 TB of media I wanted to back up off-site. Synology HyperBackup can speak S3. Google Drive Workspace gives you generous per-user storage, but…
Read →BLOG · PAGE 8
Page 8
Never build new things inside the assistant
I built a small water-tracker for myself: pick a bottle preset, tap a button, get a daily total. First version landed as a few /water/* routes inside the…
Read →Hanging the API at scale: SQLite was the wrong default
A custom backup engine I wrote was happily writing tens of thousands of chunk rows to SQLite. Then I bumped concurrency from two backup jobs to ten, and…
Read →Recovering orphaned jobs after a worker restart
A backup service kept getting into a state where the worker queue showed
Read →A dashboard deadlock from missing per-task timeouts
My homelab home page started returning 504 for its /api/dashboard route. Nothing else was obviously broken. The page just hung.
Read →Why Google Drive eats HyperBackup, and what to do instead
I had 27 TB of stuff on my NAS that I wanted backed up to Google Drive. Synology HyperBackup ran for weeks, made it about a third of the way, and the…
Read →Turning years of screenshots into a searchable journal
I have a Mac screenshots folder with thousands of files. Most of them are chat conversations — iMessage, Signal, Teams, email — captured because I wanted…
Read →Moderate risk alert at midnight, awake at the desk
A side-project safety app generated a moderate-severity risk alert for me at 00:28 local time. I was at my desk, awake, trading messages with two…
Read →The crontab edit that loaded a stale /tmp file
I wanted to bump the cadence of one cron job from every 15 minutes to every 10. Three minutes later, seven of my scheduled jobs were gone — replaced with…
Read →OCRing the live screen was the wrong validator
I built a small nightly QA runner for my personal iOS apps. It builds each app, boots a simulator, installs and launches, takes a screenshot, and OCRs…
Read →A wall-clock guard so cron jobs don't drift across DST
I wanted a nightly job to fire at exactly 00:00 Central, every night, forever. Debian's vixie-cron doesn't support CRON_TZ, and the host runs in UTC. The…
Read →Driving a Windows VM install with qm sendkey
I needed to slipstream a Windows 11 install across a handful of VMs on Proxmox without sitting in front of a noVNC window pressing Enter for an hour. The…
Read →Never let the test agent grade itself
I have a small nightly QA runner that exercises my personal apps — builds them, drives them, takes screenshots, asserts they actually work. The single…
Read →Five cron jobs sharing one atomic-rename temp file
Five Python pollers, one per messaging source, all on *. Each one writes a shared cursors file to remember where it left off. The dashboard showed…
Read →