Gabriel's Blog
Slightly Intelligent Home
March 6, 2023
Generated with the Midjourney bot "An internet connected house" I'm not overly-eager to automate my whole home. Leaving aside security concerns, it's also really, really expensive. However, there are some small quality-of-life things I've added over time or kept over the years that I've found very helpful. It's an evolving thing and there are a few "smart home" objects I would never, ever touch (internet connected "smart" deadlocks anyone?
Using CouchDB as a Website Backend
September 25, 2022
She’s a Coucher!
Not too long ago, I was shown CouchDB, a wonderous database promising to let me relax. It was presented as a database that would be able to effectively act as a standalone app backend, without any need for a custom backend for simple applications. At the time, I didn’t think I had any use for a document store (or “NoSQL database”), nor did I want to remove any of my existing custom backends - I spent so long writing them!
Infrastructure at Furality
August 17, 2022
You can find the slide deck here
Back in November of 2021, Furality Legends convention took place, and I attended along with my SO Becki. It was an interesting experience, and I bought a VR headset (an Oculus Quest 2) about halfway through to properly immerse myself. During the tech enthousiast meetup, a volunteer of the convention popped in, and while speaking to another attendee mentioned they were open to new volunteers.
Current Infrastructure (2022)
July 11, 2022
Keep it interesting My personal infrastructure has evolved quite significantly over the years, from a single Raspberry Pi 1, to a Raspberry Pi 2 and ThinkCenter mini PC, to my current setup consisting of two Raspberry Pis, a few cloud servers, and a NAS that is currently being put together. At the heart of my infrastructure is my tailnet. All machines, server, desktop, mobile, whatever, get added to the network, mostly for ease of access.
Creating an Artist's Website
May 14, 2022
So my girlfriend is doing comissions… If you're coming to this post expecting some magical journey into the design and implementation of some fancy abstract website, I'm sorry to disappoint - this will instead be a relatively technical post about building out a very simple web frontend for both displaying comission information, building out an API (or more specifically, a headless content management system) for managing a few specific bits of content on said site (including images and text.