Posts

Absolutely floored by StirlingPDF. Installing it barely took 3 minutes and it’s got features that will give Adobe a run for its money!

The pains and joys of self-hosting and tinkering. There’s always something that is broken, ready to be fixed, to be upgraded, can be built upon or changed. It is like a puzzle that constantly evolves depending on the time you invest in it. And every once in a while it exposes the silver lining that keeps you hooked to it.

M and I tend to share photos with family and friends on various chat groups. While straightforward, It felt redundant to share copies of the same pictures in multiple places. I’ve been looking for options to share album links instead that would give us a bit more control. All our photos are primarily saved in a Nextcloud self-hosted instance. I explored a few options of album shares there but wasn’t quite happy. Pixelfed was another option I explored. It did check most of the requirements but I wasn’t quite comfortable relying on a software that’s mostly dependent on just one developer. Also the unlisted feature on their albums seemed half-baked and not yet ready for prime-time. Finally played a bit with PhotoPrism and so far it seems to be something that checks all the boxes. With private links, a PWA app and great thumbnails this might be the closest solution for my photo needs. ...

Been looking for a Google voice number replacement for sometime now and looks like I might have found one that meets most of my needs. Just got a JMP number and ordered a sim with a data plan. The cheogram app so far has been great and once I get the SIM I might slowly transition things out of GV.

Wanting to have more control on the Digital Photo Frame that I setup a few days ago, I ordered a few Sonoff smart plugs. Right after I ordered them I realised I could actually flash Tasmota on them to keep them cloud-free. Ordered a couple FTDI USB adapters to flash Tasmota on them. Time to dust off that soldering gun!

Brought the Grand Vitara home today. We’d been on the lookout for a decent car ever since we knew about our next posting. We don’t need one here in CDMX but would definitely need one in Yaounde. All I wanted was a reliable bare minimum car with no gadgetry shabangs. Over the last few months folks on their PCS did post a few decent cars but these are barely in the market for a few hours. With this one though, the stars seemed to align all well one day and we were able to seal the deal in a few hours. ...

Went to a Blue Man Group performance last Friday. Our first and most likely last. The drums were great but the theatrics left a lot to be desired. Also didn’t help that S was in one of her super emotional moods…

Used the spare RPI3 I salvaged from the NCP migration and made a decent digital photo frame. Ever since I consolidated all my photos, I’ve been wanting to setup a digital frame that would take us back in time on command. Some version of ‘On this day’ – but for photos. I think I have a solution that is close to what I had in mind. The photos are currently on a USB drive synced from my Nextcloud server via a cron job. I still need to work out how I choose what photos get displayed when. But so far, I am pretty happy with how this has turned out. ...

S just got back from a week long camping trip in Pipiol. This is the first time she’s been away from M or me overnight and she seems to have handled it real well! Super proud of her! All credit goes to her school for prepping the class right from the very beginning of the school year.

Last weekend I got a bit cocky and decided to upgrade the distro on the NextcloudPi. The upgrade seemed to go well until it threw a PHP error which got me going in circles. In hindsight, I’d setup automatic upgrades on NextcloudPi and Nextcloud, which seems to have conflicted with the actual distribution’s update. Now I did take a backup, but that didn’t quite sit well with the now upgraded system and the myriad PHP issues. ...