NEW PKM SETUP
Rational I have just finished my Bachelors degree and realized that I have accumulated quite a collection of tools for note taking, knowledge management, and reference material storage over the last several years. These tools work, but often find myself putting things in different places and needing to look in 4-5 different places for things. I believe this is because I have to many tools that fill similar roles, the full list is;
SWITCHING TO HUGO FROM JEKYLL
I’ve been neglecting this blog and decided I would update it to at least get a verified link in Mastodon (@gardenmwm@mastodon.social) However when started trying to tweak the Jekyll setup I completely broke the site. I was never really happy with the way Jekyll themes worked so I started looking at alternatives and decided to give Hugo a try. Getting Hugo Setup I was suprised at how easy it was to setup after Jekyll.
SCHEDULING WITH LAUNCHD ON MACOS
Mac OS LaunchD I’m working on setting up some scheduled tasks to backup select files to my NAS from my MacOS desktop. Since MacOS keeps deprecating various unix utilities, I checked to see if cron was still supported, and while it still works, it has officially been deprecated in favor of LaunchD. This started an adventure. Since I like to keep things supported I figured I’d do a quick LaunchD service and be done, but unfortunately my google fu failed to find any official documentation that on it.
GITHUB CONTAINER CI/CD
Background I’m working on setting up a fully automated static blog workflow for this blog. Eventually I’ll move this to be hosted on a Kubernetes cluster but thats still on the todo list. The basic workflow looks to be something like this Blog Post Workflow This workflow shows that basically I want a github action/workflow (I’m still not sure on the terminology around these) to build the site with Jekyll and then create and push a container to a container registry with this.
MAKERS MARK GENERATIONS OF PROOF REVIEW
I came across this sampler at Costco and thought it would be interesting to try. I’m not a huge makers fan, although Makers 46 isn’t to bad, but I’ve never had their cask strength versions. Trying this out was interesting, they are all definitely related, and I was suprised by how well they turned out. The first one up was the Makers Cask Strength. This was suprisingly good given that I’m not a huge fan of Makers, but this had more body than what I’m used to which is expected from the higher proof.
MOVING TO JEKYLL
I’ve been looking into moving some stuff to a Kubernetes cluster to play aroudn with that, and one item I thought of moving was this blog. However, as wordpress is not really designed for that application, I started looking at alternatives. I have always had a facisnation with static site generators, but I never found a theme that I liked, and my design skills, well, suck. However, I came across a theme that I really like Chirpy for the Jekyll static site generator.
AMAZON PURCHASE CLASSIFIER
I just released a tool that I built to help categorize Amazon purchases. Since Amazon charges order partially, its really difficult to do split transactions, or even categorize transactions in Quicken. So I built a tool that takes the order reports that Amazon generates, along with a list of categories, and provides an interface to help categorize them. It’s live at https://mattwmarshall.com/amazonclassifier/
ROCKS ON THE LAKE
Just went for a trip up to Prescott, AZ and I got to take some fabulous pictures. My favorites is this landscape of rocks reflecting on the water. I’m going to try and have this printed on glass and see how it looks. I’m hoping that the shininess highlights the water reflections.
JUST PASSED THE A+
So even though I took my A+ close to 20 years ago, I needed to retake it for my degree program. It’s amazing how much has changed with desktop support over the last 20 years, gone are the days of IRQ’s and in it’s place are upgrade paths. I must admit I think the older tests were more valuable, as the current tests are more about features than how the systems actually work.
LET’S ENCRYPT AND CERTBOT ROCK
I was thrilled when Let’s Encypt first came out, and I setup a few websites with it’s free SSL certificates. I ended up letting the SSL certificates expire as the sites were somewhat forgotten. Today I wanted to get SSL working for this site, as well as a couple of other sites, and I used the certbot tool. I can’t believe how awesome this tool was. If you haven’t already seen it, it will auto request the cert, apply the domain challenge, and then modify your Apache configs to add SSL.
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