I Built a Custom GPT This Week and Now I Cant Stop
A weekend spent building custom GPTs after OpenAI's DevDay update, plus notes on the new GPT-4 Turbo pricing and what actually works once you sit down and try it.
Tutorials
Tutorials
Twitter Broke My Old Posts, So I Finally Set Up RSS Again
Twitter's new rate limits broke every embedded tweet on this blog, so I finally set up a self-hosted FreshRSS instance. Here's the twenty-minute Docker setup.
Finally Killing My Google Analytics Habit
With Universal Analytics set to stop collecting data on July 1st, I finally ripped Google Analytics out of techpad's footer and moved to Fathom instead. Here's what that migration actually looked like.
Ditching Google Analytics Before It Ditches Me
Ditching the looming Universal Analytics sunset for a self-hosted Umami setup on a $6 droplet, plus a quick aside about that Twitter doge logo swap.
What ChatGPT Is Actually Good For, After Three Weeks
Three weeks of actually using ChatGPT for regex and scripting grunt work, plus the one time it confidently invented a find command flag that doesn't exist.
Picking a Mastodon Instance Is the Part Nobody Warns You About
I spent Black Friday weekend setting up Mastodon instead of shopping, and the hardest part wasn't the app, it was just picking a server.
Setting Up Mastodon: The Part Nobody Explains Well
A practical, no-hype walkthrough of setting up a Mastodon account this week, including the server-picking confusion nobody warns you about.
Fine, I'll Update Right Now
Apple's iOS 15.6.1 patched two zero-days already being exploited in the wild, no clicks required. Here's how I finally set every device I own to update itself without me having to remember.
Living With Stage Manager (And Other iOS 16 Beta Notes)
Three weeks into the iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 public betas: lock screen widgets are better than I expected, Stage Manager is still fighting me, and passkeys are almost here.
Making My Own Version of the JWST Carina Nebula Photo
I downloaded the raw JWST data from MAST and tried to make my own version of the Carina Nebula photo. It did not go as smoothly as I expected.
Two Weeks of Letting Copilot Finish My Sentences
A holiday-weekend writeup on two weeks of actually using GitHub Copilot since it left preview and went generally available, warts and all.
Four Log4j Patches Later, Here's Where Things Actually Stand
Log4j just shipped its fourth patch of the month (2.17.1, December 28th) and I spent part of my holiday break re-checking every server I run. Here's where things actually stand and what to check first.