Logging a CLI into OAuth with nobody at the keyboard
A CLI's OAuth refresh token expired on a headless box. Getting it signed in again meant expect, a Playwright browser, and reading the magic-link email out of my own mail pipeline.
Read →Chester Frazier · Gulfport, MS · b. 1988
Notes from the homelab,
the studio, and the day job.
Debugging stories, architecture notes, and the occasional thing I built because nobody else had. New posts when I have something worth writing down.
Posts
14 on this page · full archive (277)
A share link that has to forget who you are
Adding public share links to a Postgres row-level-security app means resolving a stranger to a tenant before any tenant is bound — plus a SwiftUI nested-ScrollView trap that dragged a whole screen off its left edge.
Read →The text view that asked for the whole screen
A UITextView with scrolling disabled reports its intrinsic width as the full unwrapped line, and SwiftUI believes it. Why my chat composer ran off the screen edge instead of wrapping, and the four-part fix.
Read →systemd forgets when your job last ran
I built a status panel for six nightly sync jobs and every one of them read 'clean · —'. systemd discards a template instance's ExecMain timestamps the moment the unit goes inactive.
Read →The seed packet that wasn't a barcode
My garden app's packet scanner stripped every non-digit from whatever the camera read. That works for a UPC and quietly destroys a QR code — which is what small seed houses actually print.
Read →Seven Layers of Permission Denied: Netbooting Windows 11 Without a TPM
A network install of Windows 11 failed with permission denied. It turned out to be seven unrelated faults stacked on top of each other, and only one was actually a permission.
Read →Postgres Evaluates the Branch Your CASE Never Takes
A CASE expression with a guarded date cast threw an invalid-date error from the arm that could never run. Constant folding happens before the guard does.
Read →The Contact-Form Spam a Keyword List Can Never Catch
My contact form's blocklist caught crypto scams for months, then a polite Wikipedia sales pitch walked through scoring zero. Adding an LLM stage fixed it — and introduced a prompt-injection hole.
Read →Eight Seconds and a Fortnight
Wiring a self-hosted assistant into Alexa and replacing a dumb alarm turned up three constraints worth writing down: an eight-second wall, an ISO-week trap, and a phrase Siri refuses to learn.
Read →Three things break when a screenshot uploader starts taking video
accept=image/* greys out every video in the iOS photo picker — and fixing that exposes two more bugs: an in-memory multipart parse and a file server that ignores Range.
Read →Stop guessing what needs water: a real water balance for a garden app
Replacing 'water everything every other day' with an ET0 x Kc water balance — pot volume, root depth, rain, plant age — and using the same model to catch the plants being drowned.
Read →chapterize — turn flat audiobooks into chaptered, open-format files
A dependency-free Python wrapper around ffmpeg that chapters a flat audiobook using the publisher's real Audible markers and outputs open Opus-in-Matroska. Install, CLI and GUI instructions.
Read →When an SCP outranks your IAM grant
SAM kept failing with AccessDenied on the Serverless transform even after I granted the deploy role every permission it asked for. The blocker wasn't IAM — it was an Organizations SCP, and no grant can override a Deny.
Read →ITMS-90111 wasn't my Xcode — it was my beta macOS build machine
App Store review rejected two builds for an 'unsupported Xcode version' I was already running. The real cause had nothing to do with Xcode or signing — the build machine was on a beta macOS.
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