Blog

I've written about file managers for Android before, recently I found X-plore which makes it very easy to transfer files back and forth between Android and SMB network shares, once you understand how the UI works. Here's how I set that up.

When working on a GitHub repo from different Linux hosts, I encountered an "insufficient permission" error when using git commands. Here is the solution that worked for me from StackOverflow.

My situation was simple -- I have on my home server a 2 TB hard drive for media storage that was filling up, and I wanted to add a second drive, but not have to keep track of which drive specific files were in. Enter mergerfs, an open source "union filesystem" that lets you merge multiple storage drives into one mount point.

Home Assistant is an open source home automation solution that gives you local control over your smart home. It can also be run on Libre Computer's boards, but I ran into some issues following the official instructions from Libre, so here's how I got it working.

Something a little different. Not a guide, just thoughts and opinions about a recent controversy over Netlify, and a decision about the site I made as a result.

In this guide I explain how to self-host a static web blog using Nginx as webserver and expose it to the internet via a Cloudflare tunnel.

I've been wanting to get a Raspberry Pi for ages, but they were out of stock for the longest time, so I never ended up with one. Recently I learned about the Le Potato from Libre Computer as a Pi-alternative, and after some research paid the $30 early access price for their new Sweet Potato SBC. Here's how I set it up.

Setting up SMB shares is fairly easy, but I do it so infrequently I often forget the steps and need to look them up anyway. So I made myself two sets of smb config files for quickly setting up shares, either public or with a login required.

The docker install instructions are different in 2023 than in previous years, so I wrote up a quick step-by-step guide straight from the offcial docs.

I've run Pi-Hole bare metal for years and recently decided to run a secondary instance of Pi-Hole on another machine as a Docker container. Gravity Sync keeps them updated with all the same DNS records, block lists, etc. Here's how I set it up.

I've been using OpenMediaVault 6 for over a year now, and it's user interface can be a bit obtuse, so I wrote myself a series of quick step-by-step guides for enabling certain features within the OMV workbench UI.

Configs necessary for Pi-Hole to use either Cloudflared or Unbound as forwarding resolver to Quad9 using DNS over TLS.

Cloudflare Tunnels have been around for a few years and are well regarded alternatives for VPNs or port-forwarding on a router. They are often used to expose access to self-hosted apps from outside the local network with minimal config or hassle. Here's how it's done.

Sometimes DNS issues in Pi-Hole are a result of the DNS query rate-limiting enabled by default, which can be disabled altogether by editing a single file.

My scenario was simple: I wanted to access the web GUIs of OpenMediaVault, Plex and Navidrome via a URL like plex.home.arpa without having to remember IPs and ports, inside my home network only and without the need for SSL/HTTPS. Nothing fancy, nothing accessible from outside my house. Here's how I did that with Nginx Proxy Manager as the reverse proxy and Pi-Hole as the DNS.

When using Pi-Hole as a network-wide ad blocker, your DNS requests still go out in plain text and can be seen by your ISP. DNS over HTTPS encrypts DNS requests between your Pi-Hole and the upstream DNS resolver. Here is a quick guide on how to set that up with Cloudflared daemon.

Google Photos began limiting free storage back in 2021, limiting you to 15 GB of storage when uploading photos in their original size uncompressed. Rather than wait and see if I hit the cap, I decided to try replacing Google Photos with a self-hosted solution. Here's how I did it.

Normally a Samba share will require login with a username and password, but sometimes you just want anyone on the network to access a specific share without needing to worry about that. Here's a quick and easy way of making a (fairly insecure) Samba share available to anyone on your local network.

Commands necessary to delete partitions, wipe a disk completely and install a new filesystem.

Sometimes I use laptops in the home lab, and to save myself on a few watts of power usage I use these terminal commands to turn off the display, then just SSH into it from my PC.

Configure an Ubuntu machine to autologin and go straight into the terminal on boot.

I'd been meaning to play around with Deno and finally got around to doing it in the quickest, easiest (and laziest) way possible -- using a minimal blog template. I also took the opportunity to learn how Deno Deploy works. The whole thing is quick and painless, here's how to do it.

There are many File Managers/File Explorers on the Google Play Store, but I wanted to easily access the Samba share on my server while on my home network. Solid Explorer is the solution I went with and it works well, so here is a quick guide to setting it up.

FileBrowser is a self-hosted file manager for a specified directory in a Linux machine that lets you upload, download, move, copy, create, delete, rename, and edit your files in a nice web interface through your browser. Here's a quick guide to setting it up in Docker.

Generating and using a GPG key is not difficult, but every time I need to remember how to do it to sign my commits from a new machine, I need to go through several pages of explanation on GitHub. So I made myself a terse and concise one-page quick guide, here it is.

Network File Share or NFS allows sharing directories between Linux hosts on the same network, similar to Samba though it has better performance with small and medium-sized files comparatively. Here's a quick guide on setting up an NFS share between Linux hosts.

When running a headless home server, you may want to set up a monitoring solution to keep track of your server's performance. Node Exporter will expose your server's metrics, cAdvisor will expose metrics for Docker containers, and Prometheus will scrape and collect those metrics, which is then used as a data source for Grafana dashboards. Here's how to get it all set up in Docker.

Though Plex is a very popular media server for self-hosting, some open source enthusiasts prefer to use an alternative since Plex Media Server is not open source. A nice, simpler and admittedly less pretty alternative is Jellyfin. This guide will show you how to run it in Docker container.

One of the most popular services to self-host in Plex Media Server, which serves your personal media library with a nice Netflix-like UI. Though you can install and run it bare-metal, the most common and easiest way is in a Docker container. Here's how.

If you want your Linux machine to stay up-to-date on important security updates, but you don't want to SSH into it all the time to run updates and would rather set it and forget it, this is the way.

I'm much more comfortable using Bash over PowerShell, but there are definitely times that you need to use command line on Windows. So I keep a small, but growing list of my most commonly used cmdlets, their Linux-like aliases, and other must-know commands.

Just a quick guide to format and partition hard drives in Linux command line that I wrote for myself a long time ago, and recently had to reference again.

I've been using Pi-Hole for a few years, and I just recently set it up again on a new machine with a new router. It's stupid easy and super effective, here's how.

Debian's non-graphical install does not give you the option to set a static IP, here's a quick guide to doing it manually on the command line.

Most of my experience with Linux is via the Ubuntu distribution, which includes sudo as a default. Debian does not have sudo or superuser accounts, here's how to add it and set it up.

Although I love using Netlify to host my site, for testing out sites and simple apps I have fallen in love with Surge.sh, a ridiculously simple web hosting solution that works entirely from the command line.

I sometimes use old laptops in my home lab when I want to test anything on Linux, and I prefer to keep them closed so they take up less space. A few quick commands will keep the laptop even on with the lid closed.

While I use Zsh with Oh-My-Zsh for making my Linux terminal pretty, it's not available for Windows. Luckily it's brother from another mother Oh-My-Posh basically does the same thing for Windows Terminal and PowerShell.

I've been running a bunch of services on my home server in docker containers for a few years now. It's quick and easy to set up once you get used to it. Here's a quick and dirty guide to installing Docker and Docker Compose, and getting several containers up and running.

Using the Secure Copy (SCP) utility in Linux lets you securely copy files to and from remote hosts, and it's very easy to use.

Markdown can render A LOT of characters and symbols using specific 'entities', and can do other things like render tables, so I made myself a list of common or handy, but easy-to-forget markdown hacks based off the official Markdown Guide.

Just a quick cheat sheet of basic and slightly less basic Linux commands, as well as handy keyboard shortcuts, that I maintain for myself since I can't always remember them all.

Whenever I use Vim to edit files on Linux, I need to relearn how to use it. Years ago I found a thread on Stack Overflow with two simple and extremely useful answers that helped me make sense of Vim. So here it is.

I wanted to style my <kbd> element to look like a keyboard, and a google search took me to someone else's blog post that had a nice bit of code and invited others to steal it. So I did.

Ansible is an IT tool that enables Infrastructure as Code, letting you automate provisioning, configuration, management and deployment of services and applications. I like using it at a fraction of it's full power to bootstrap fresh installs of Linux for my homelab.

How to use sudo command in Linux without the password prompt, by adding a line to the sudoers file.

Frameworks and libraries are great and all, but sometimes you just want to make a simple website with only HTML, CSS and JavaScript — maybe without the latter even. When making a PWA, it’s common to use a framework like Vue or a library like Workbox, which requires a bundler like Webpack. In truth, that’s completely unnecessary!

I've been getting more and more comfortable working on the command line in Linux, and looked into ways to pretty it up and make it more user friendly. Enter Zsh, an alternative to Bash shell, and the Oh-My-Zsh framework used to customize the terminal experience to your heart's content. Here's my basic set up.

PrismJS is great for making code blocks look pretty, it comes with a set of several themes out of the box, and there's also many more additional themes available as a separate package on NPM and Yarn. But what if none of those matches the color scheme of your website? With Nuxt you can easily use a custom CSS file to make your code blocks perfectly match the overall look of your site or blog. Here's how.

Netlify has some nice built-in features, and one of them is Netlify Forms, which essentially handles the back-end of your forms in most cases. But when hosting your Nuxt site on Netlify, it may not detect it even after you follow the instructions in their documentation, usually because there's one key trick missing that just makes it work. So let's discuss that trick and make sure Netlify Forms does what it's supposed to.

The excellent Nuxt/Sitemap module can automatically generate a new sitemap.xml at each build, and you can set either static and/or dynamic routes in it's config. It can also auto-generate routes to your blog posts (or whatever other content) fetched and displayed in a slug file, so a new post shows up with the correct route in the sitemap when created. Here's a quick and simple guide for Nuxt/Sitemap to generate routes to your Nuxt/Content blog posts, whether static or SSR.

Setting up SSH keys and pushing to GitHub without needing to enter a username and password has always been a good practice, but now that GitHub is deprecating basic username and password authentication, it's past time to get this set up if you haven't already. It's pretty simple and only takes a few minutes, here's the quick and dirty instructions.

I was having some issue getting this to work on a static (not SSR) site made with Nuxt, and although I read through a bunch of blog articles, most of them seemed to be missing some piece of information or other that made it not work for me. After mixing and matching some of the instructions, and combining the useful info with the official Nuxt documentation, I finally did all the necessary steps and got it to work. So here's a clear, succinct guide to using Prism.js in a Nuxt static site.

Rsync is a very handy tool for doing high-speed file transfers between Linux hosts over a local network or remote hosts on the internet, such as EC2 instances on Amazon Web Services. You can pass options to Rsync to do things like recursive transfer (all files and sub-directories within the source directory are also transferred), ignore existing or newer files at the destination, and more.

When using Linux headless, such as via SSH or with no desktop environment, accessing a newly installed hard drive (not just external USB drives, but additional internal HDDs too) is not obvious, and most people end up having to Google it. I know I did. So let's have a quick and dirty guide on how.

Secure Shell is a protocol for securely connecting from one computer to another. As a web developer, you will probably end up using SSH a lot, and even if you don't it's a handy skill to have. Here's a quick guide on how to generate SSH keys and copy them to other machines.

Getting started learning Amazon Web Services can be a bit intimidating. Once you've created your free account there's so many services on the AWS console that it can be overwhelming and confusing to figure out where to get started. So let's ease our way and start by just hosting a simple static website with AWS Amplify, it only takes a few minutes!

When I was learning Git, in order to avoid giant articles and get right to the commands I needed reminding of, I made myself a cheat sheet that plainly and succinctly explained each Git command. Here is that quick and dirty guide of Git commands that you will likely use often as a web developer.

So you're learning web development, building things locally and only ever seeing your site or app when you run it on your computer. But how do you get this thing online so you can make sure it works on the interwebs? How do you learn headers, content-security-policy and CORS without having a site hosted online to work with? And how to do it FOR FREE?

A quick and dirty guide on how to easily set up a Samba share on Linux that can be accessed from Windows PCs on the same network.

I have a Sony Bravia 4K TV and it is awesome. It has built-in Android TV so you can use Android apps on your TV, but not every app is available, and one of those is DirecTV Stream -- necessary to view live TV from my cable provider, AT&T, without need for a separate set-top box. So here's how to sideload the DirecTV Stream app on Sony Bravia TVs without using the Google Play Store.

How to copy SSH keys between Linux hosts and from Windows to Linux.