https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/homelabfest-announcement/
@waffles@masto.yttrx.com this looks pretty cool! Well cool as in nerdy I guess.
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Tom Robertson
@tommertron@masto.yttrx.com
mastodon 4.7.3
IT person by trade, nerd by calling. Sometimes I write things in a text editor.
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38 Posts
Joined November 07, 2022
Pronouns:
he/him
City:
Toronto, Canada 🇨🇦
Replying to
@waffles@masto.yttrx.com Yeah we actually used a spreadsheet for this exact thing for a number of years and it was a beast. It was set up for ease of entry where each row was a date and each column an account. But of course if you understand data structures you can appreciate what a pain it was to do formulas to categorize and parse all that.
This has a nice entry interface, plus a proper database structure. And I was able to migrate everything from my old spreadsheet.
Plus all my data lives on the pi, not on google’s servers! (Backed up to my Mac mini, backed up to backblaze).
I open sourced my little vibe coded asset tracker / retirement / education planner if anyone wants to try. Very Canadian focused and assumes you have kids and a mortgage I guess too. Self hosted web app (doesn’t really have the infrastructure to deploy on a public web server right now.)
https://github.com/tommertron/asset-tracker
Replying to
@gnomon@mastodon.social You think I’m gonna f with a spreadsheet for this? At a minimum this is an SQLite database.
Today:
Drove from Tampa to Orlando
Flew from Orlando to Toronto
Took two trains from airport home.
Always great to complete the full Planes Trains and Automobiles trifecta in a single day.
Replying to
Replying to
@hiro Oh hey want to try my iOS budgeting app in beta?
https://testflight.apple.com/join/JU3PvjA2
This was fun. Made a litle MacOS menubar app for raindrop.io bookmarks.
Despite offloading home assistant and a bunch of other stuff to an external hdd and despite having a UPS to stop power interrupts on write, my Pi’s SD card was corrupted yet again!
This time I’m not going back to sd cards at all. I ordered an external high speed ssd that I’ll run off.
I don’t even know why they suggest using sd cards for pis at all. They’re garbage for running a computer on.
Finally decided that as much as I love Things and am a long time user, I really needed(wanted?) something with a web service so I could do nerdy things with my todos. Already incorporating interactive to dos on my daily dashboard web app with the Todoist api key.
And I did the nerd rite of passage today: created a packing list builder that I can use to send packing lists to Todoist.
I really miss Craigslist. I know it’s a thing still but it doesn’t really seem to be used.
I almost always had a good experience listing things on Craigslist as well as buying things. Such a great community. Everyone seemed fair and reasonable.
The de facto standard now is Facebook marketplace and it’s so terrible. You just get a million automated messages asking “is this still available?” And then then when you reply nothing. And people making completely dumb and unreasonable counter offers.
Replying to
@waffles@masto.yttrx.com Yeah I’m at that point now too. Most stuff just goes to the curb.
For apple tech stuff I just take the trade in value if Apple will give it to me or leave it with them to recycle. The money I leave on the table doing that is not at all worth my time trying to sell privately anymore.
TIL about monorepos. The idea sounds… insane? to me. But I kinda get it?
Oh man only one week to go until my back country canoe trip with my daughter in alonguin. Have not done a canoe camping trip since camp when I was a kid. My kid has been really into canoeing at camp and wants to stern the canoe. I’m kinda freaking out but also really looking forward to it.
When you call a company’s helpline and want to talk to a human you can press zero. Then they’ll still ask you questions. You can press zero again and it’ll continue to push back. I don’t know how many zeros it takes but i find if I just jam on zero a ludicrous amount of times I’ll get to an agent.
Started up a little sub-site of micro-apps I've built with claude that i thought people might find useful. Just a packing list helper and a mortgage calculator for now but more to come?
I made a 'monorepo' for the apps and I'm hosting them on Railway — part of the reason i did this was to experiment with both of those. I really like railway so far!
Anyway hope people find these useful.
https://coefficiencies.com/apps/
Man, the Shoresy people must be so grateful for Heated Rivalry. The very loose connection to the latter got so much buzz for the former.
Replying to
I lost this guy today. I did not want these cats. I pushed against it. She wormed her way into my lap and heart slowly but surely over the years. I can’t believe she’s gone. I’m devastated.
@gruber@mastodon.social The disappointing thing about Apple News ads is the ads are just shovelware. They just stuck in the same programmatic crap every other place does.
Why not go old school and classy? Have a creative services team that works on bespoke and classy ads for high end brands, like an old school magazine.
Old school magazine ads were great! Often well designed and interesting. And I don’t mean shitty spon con. I mean well designed ads that fit well within the Apple News app without getting in the way.
“We’re pleased to announce that all Taylor farms lettuce has been removed from our stores. Taco Bell customers can go back to experiencing regular, non explosive diarrhea after enjoying a meal at Taco Bell, as god intended.”
Replying to on crikey.social
@ross@crikey.social Eventually yes! And it’s a very good tennis game! I was insanely frustrated at first because I was just like, I just want to place tennis man. But first it made me do training. And then finally tennis. But I was so invested by that point it made it all worth it.
TIL about the Shakespeare programming language whose code looks like a Shakespeare play but is functional code. Man I love nerds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Language?wprov=sfti1#
Also one week until I see the new Spider-Man with my kids, a movie starring three stars from the Odyssey that I think will be infinitely more enjoyable than the Odyssey itself. Don’t at me.
Oh man so awesome to get my quote as the closer to @mwichary@mastodon.online’s excellent rundown of great software updates with Mario flying around without a care in the world. Chef’s kiss!
https://unsung.aresluna.org/a-good-kind-of-an-update-the-responses/
Hey my little plain text editor / notes app is on TestFlight if anyone wants to check it out!
https://testflight.apple.com/join/azXQyHqy
I feel bad I did not like Odyssey as much as everyone else. I mean it was pretty cool in some parts. But I was bored for big chunk. And it was so self serious. I dunno. Maybe I’m just a crank.
Replying to
@jayfm Do you use Proxmox instead of docker? I’m not overly familiar with that tool.
Homeassistant on the Pi5 has actually been pretty snappy and stable. I don’t even know if it’s it causing the sd card issues.
OMG go to a terminal and type `ssh snakes.run`
@mwichary@mastodon.online Re not messing with user input, I agree startup animations are bad. I was hoping one day though you’d talk about ‘stealing focus’. Like if I’m typing on a mac, and mid-type a dialogue pops up and now i’m typing in there / issuing commands.
Or when you’re *just* about to tap a button on your phone, but then the ui changes underneath you as you’re moving there and you miss it. I wish I had more examples of the latter but it’s so frustrating. It should be a crime.
Oh man guess who’s got the house to themselves tonight and a whole pile of usb cables to test.
https://www.whatcable.uk/pro