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On-Call Credos

On-Call Credos

I've been in on-call rotations for more than a decade. When computers I manage have a problem, they page my team 24/7 for help. I use these credos so being on-call goes as smoothly as possible. Find out before the customer does Whether the customer is internal

Garmin Fenix 5 Plus at work

How to replace the battery in a Garmin Fenix 5 Plus watch

The Garmin Fenix 5 Plus was released in 2018 and is still a great running watch in 2023. Some features include heat rate tracking, VO2 max, recovery advisor, payments and offline music. There's also my favorite: offline maps and navigation. When I bought a used Fenix 5 Plus

A dozen automations and DevOps practices I replaced with Ansible

A dozen automations and DevOps practices I replaced with Ansible

Ansible is an automation tool that can you run from your laptop or a server to automate tasks across many servers. It's simple enough to use for personal tasks, flexible enough to introduce incrementally, and powerful enough to scale. As I learned to "think an Ansible"

Ghost as blog and newsletter software for a local political campaign

Ghost as blog and newsletter software for a local political campaign

Yesterday Hopi Stosberg won her primary in a location election. I volunteered to setup web software for her. Here's what worked. Local campaign software goals In this small, local campaign there was no paid staff, so the candidate would be posting website content and sending out newsletters herself,

My Ghost Headline theme fork with dark mode

This blog is powered by the free, open source Ghost blogging software. Why I like the Headline theme For my personal site I wanted a dark mode theme that would work well for writing about a range of unrelated topics. I also go for months without writing anything at all,

Self-hosting Matomo with a shared MySQL database

The official way to self-host Matomo Analytics is using it's own dedicated MySQL container along with a container for Matomo. I'm hosting it on a VPS with limited resources that's already running a MySQL database, so I wanted Matomo to connect to the MySQL

xpanes, a parallel ssh tool

xpanes, a parallel ssh tool

iIdeally, you don't need to log into your Linux servers. They are set up and managed through automation tools like Ansible. All key monitoring metrics and logs are shipped off-site and presented in beautiful dashboards. But we live in an imperfect world where the Ansible playbooks aren'