Turning years of screenshots into a searchable journal
I have a Mac screenshots folder with thousands of files. Most of them are chat conversations — iMessage, Signal, Teams, email — captured because I wanted…
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Why Google Drive eats HyperBackup, and what to do instead
I had 27 TB of stuff on my NAS that I wanted backed up to Google Drive. Synology HyperBackup ran for weeks, made it about a third of the way, and the…
Read →OCRing the live screen was the wrong validator
I built a small nightly QA runner for my personal iOS apps. It builds each app, boots a simulator, installs and launches, takes a screenshot, and OCRs…
Read →The crontab edit that loaded a stale /tmp file
I wanted to bump the cadence of one cron job from every 15 minutes to every 10. Three minutes later, seven of my scheduled jobs were gone — replaced with…
Read →A wall-clock guard so cron jobs don't drift across DST
I wanted a nightly job to fire at exactly 00:00 Central, every night, forever. Debian's vixie-cron doesn't support CRON_TZ, and the host runs in UTC. The…
Read →Date-scoped views on a todo list, with a sensible default
I migrated from Todoist to my own todo app a few weeks ago. The single biggest thing I missed: Todoist's Today / Upcoming views. So I built them.
Read →Five cron jobs sharing one atomic-rename temp file
Five Python pollers, one per messaging source, all on *. Each one writes a shared cursors file to remember where it left off. The dashboard showed…
Read →Never let the test agent grade itself
I have a small nightly QA runner that exercises my personal apps — builds them, drives them, takes screenshots, asserts they actually work. The single…
Read →Driving a Windows VM install with qm sendkey
I needed to slipstream a Windows 11 install across a handful of VMs on Proxmox without sitting in front of a noVNC window pressing Enter for an hour. The…
Read →When a ThinkPad disappears from the LAN after a NIC swap
Swapped a USB-to-Ethernet adapter on a ThinkPad to fix a flaky link. After the swap, the laptop dropped off the network entirely. No reservation hit in…
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