RSS Bilingual Reader

One amusing thing about following tech news is how often the tech community makes a bold prediction or assertion, only to ultimately be completely wrong. This isn't amusing in a "ha ha, we all make mistakes" kind of way. It's amusing in the way that watching someone confidently stride into a glass door is amusing. You feel bad, but also, they really should have seen that coming. Be it VR headsets that would definitely replace reality by 2018, or self-driving cars in every dri...

When I wrote the backend for my Firefox time-wasting extension ( here ), I assumed I was going to be setting up Postgres. My setup is boilerplate and pretty boring, with everything running in Docker Compose for personal projects and then persistence happening in volumes. However when I was working with it locally, I obviously used SQLite since that's always the local option that I use. It's very easy to work with, nice to back up and move around and in general is a pleasure to work wit...

I don't like RSS readers. I know, this is blasphemous especially on a website where I'm actively encouraging you to subscribe through RSS. As someone writing stuff, RSS is great for me. I don't have to think about it, the requests are pretty light weight, I don't need to think about your personal data or what client you are using. So as a protocol RSS is great, no notes. However as something I'm going to consume, it's frankly a giant chore . I feel pressured by RSS ...

Once a month I will pull down the latest docker images for this server and update the site. The Ghost CMS team updates things at a pretty regular pace so I try to not let an update sit for too long. With this last round I suddenly found myself locked out of my Ghost admin panel. I was pretty confident that I hadn't forgotten my password and when I was looking at the logs, I saw this pretty spooky error. blog-1 | [2025-10-15 11:36:29] ERROR "GET /ghost/api/admin/users/me/?include=roles&...

Greenland is a complicated topic here in Denmark. The former colony that is still treated a bit like a colony is something that inspires a lot of emotions. Greenland has been subjected to a lot of unethical experiments by Denmark, from taking their kids to wild experiments in criminal justice. But there is also a genuine pride a lot of people have here for the place and you run into Danes who grew up there more often than I would have guessed. When the idea of going to Greenland was introduced t...

For a long time Bitnami containers and Helm charts have been widely considered the easiest and fastest way to get reliable, latest versions of popular applications built following container best practices. They also have some of the better docs on the internet for figuring out how to configure all this stuff. However Broadcom, in their infinite capacity for short term gain over long term relationships, has decided to bring that to a close. On July 16th they informed their users that the platform...

With the rise of the internet came the need to find information more quickly. The concept of search engines came into this space to fill this need, with a relatively basic initial design. This is the basis of the giant megacorp Google, whose claim to fame was they made the best one of these. Into this stack they inject ads, both ads inside the sites themselves and then turning the search results themselves into ads. As time went on, what we understood to be "Google search" was actually...

Around 2012-2013 I started to hear a lot in the sysadmin community about a technology called "Borg". It was (apparently) some sort of Linux container system inside of Google that ran all of their stuff. The terminology was a bit baffling, with something called a "Borglet" inside of clusters with "cells" but the basics started to leak. There was a concept of "services" and a concept of "jobs", where applications could use services to respond to us...

So awhile ago I purchased a Tp-link AX3000 wireless router as a temporary same-day fix to a dying AP. Of course, like all temporary fixes, this one ended up being super permanent. It's a fine wireless router, nothing interesting to report, but one of the features I stumbled upon when I was clicking around the webUI seemed like a great solution for a place to stick random files. Inside of Advanced Settings, you'll see this pane: You have a few options for how to expose this USB drive: I...

In general, Ghost CMS has been a good tool for me. I've been pleased by the speed and reliability of the platform, with the few problems I have run into being fixed by the Ghost team pretty quickly. From the very beginning though I've struggled with the basic approach of the Ghost platform. At its core, the Ghost CMS tool is a newsletter platform. This makes sense, it's how small content creators actually generate revenue. But I don't need any of that functionality, as I don&...

I generate a lot of CSVs for my jobs, mostly as a temporary storage mechanism for data. So I make report A about this thing, I make report B for that thing and then I produce some sort of consumable report for the organization at large. Part of this is merging the CSVs so I don't need to overload each scripts to do all the pieces. For a long time I've done this in Excel/LibreOffice, which totally works. But I recently sat down with the pandas library and I had no idea how easy it is us...

The impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) on the field of software development is arguably one of the most debated topics in developer circles today, sparking discussions at meetups, in lunchrooms, and even during casual chats among friends. I won't attempt to settle that debate definitively in this post, largely because I lack the foresight required. My track record for predicting the long-term success or failure of new technologies is, frankly, about as accurate as a coin flip. In fact, ...

My first formal IT helpdesk role was basically "resetting stuff". I would get a ticket, an email or a phone call and would take the troubleshooting as far as I could go. Reset the password, check the network connection, confirm the clock time was right, ensure the issue persisted past a reboot, check the logs and see if I could find the failure event, then I would package the entire thing up as a ticket and escalate it up the chain. It was effectively on the job training. We were all t...

So one of the more annoying things about moving from the US to Europe is how much of the American communication infrastructure is still built around the idea that you have a US phone number to receive text messages from. While some (a vanishingly small) percentage of them allow me to add actual 2FA and bypass the insane phone number requirement, it's a constant problem to need to get these text messages. There are services like Google Voice, but they're impossible to set up abroad. So ...

at one point i questioned my desire to help people get into open source image unrelated — Steve Klabnik (@steveklabnik.com) 2025-03-03T20:04:06.152Z Anybody who has worked in a tech stack of nearly any complexity outside of Hello World is aware of the problems with the current state of the open-source world. Open source projects, created by individuals or small teams to satisfy a specific desire they have or problem they want to solve, are adopted en masse by large organizations whose pri...