Finally Making 14 Years of Posts Searchable
I spent a slow week after the holidays bolting real full-text search onto this blog's 14-year archive using Pagefind, and it took about an hour once I stopped overthinking it.
Tutorials
Tutorials
My Annual January Server Cleanup (And Why I Still Dread It)
A walkthrough of the janky little server-cleanup ritual I do every January, from pruning Docker cruft to finally reading my own cron jobs.
Backing Up My Dotfiles Before Midnight
A New Year's Eve ritual: finally fixing my dotfiles backup with a bare git repo instead of the Dropbox folder chaos I'd been living with for a decade.
Migrating My Photo Library to Immich (Finally)
I finally moved my photo library off Google Photos onto a self-hosted Immich instance running on an old Dell under my desk. Here's how the migration actually went, panicked moment included.
The Boring December Server Cleanup I Do Every Year
My annual December ritual of checking domains, testing backups for real, and killing off forgotten VPS instances before the year ends.
Blocking the Bots Without Blocking Google
My nginx logs were full of GPTBot and ClaudeBot hammering old gallery posts, so I finally set up proper server-side blocking and rate limiting instead of trusting robots.txt.
Prepping the AoC Rig Again
Getting my Advent of Code setup sorted before December hits: a Python env with uv, a boring folder template, and a session-cookie mistake I'm not repeating.
Ten Days Later: What I Actually Changed After the AWS Outage
A personal, low-effort fix for the thing that annoyed me most about the October 20 AWS outage: my own tiny status page went down right along with everything it was supposed to be watching.
The Three-Line Cron Job That Should Have Existed Years Ago
I finally set up automated offsite backups for this blog after fourteen years of winging it, and the whole thing took about twenty minutes once I stopped overthinking it.
What Yesterday's AWS Outage Made Me Go Check On My Own Site
Yesterday's big AWS outage took out half the apps on my phone, so I spent the afternoon checking whether my own tiny site had the same dumb single points of failure.
What the Windows 10 ESU Enrollment Actually Asks For
Notes from actually enrolling an old Windows 10 machine in Microsoft's Extended Security Updates program the day after support ended, including the part about the "free" option nobody explains well.
A Weekend Fixing Twelve Years of Bad Image Habits With Claude Code
A weekend spent finally using Claude Code to clean up twelve years of unoptimized blog images, and the one lesson about scoping tasks narrowly that I keep having to relearn.