Matt Zaske Online Blog

Creating a Practical and Automatic Server and Data Backup Solution

• February 27, 2023
• 8 minutes
• automation, inspiration, personal, tech

If you had disk/storage failure (on any of your important devices/things/places), would you be "up the creek?"

For many folks, the answer to that question is "absolutely."

Upgrading All The Things to Ubuntu 22.04

• February 13, 2023
• 5 minutes
• inspiration, mistakes, php, security, tech

One of my "winter break" projects this year was to get all of my disparate Ubuntu server instances upgraded and into parity. Last year I wrote about my adventure moving WSL Ubuntu from 18.04 to 20.04, which happened before 22.04 was officially released.

Mister Thermistor, Fixed With a Silpat

• January 30, 2023
• 8 minutes
• 3d printing, inspiration, mistakes, personal, tech

I got hooked into 3D printing late last summer. A problem that cropped up after the first couple months of tinkering and relatively error-less printing was an issue with thermal runaway. Something I could correct for short periods of time, but never make totally go away...

Powershell String Manipulation - A One-Liner

• January 16, 2023
• 4 minutes
• inspiration, personal, powershell, tech

See also: asking a friend for help can save oodles of time and effort.

Around Thanksgiving 2022, an friend of mine asked to talk through a problem he thought might be solvable with Powershell, but he'd been stuck on the design. Naturally, I agreed to help out if/where I could and it provided an opportunity to chat via Zoom which I am not one to turn down.

Smart Independent Control of a Ceiling Fan & Light with Shelly 1L

• October 24, 2022
• 6 minutes
• automation, home assistant, inspiration, personal, tech

As I've noted before, my 1940's-era house has its own quirks with regard to smart home automation in large part due to 1940's wiring standards.

Smart Control of a 1940's Three-Way Switch with Shelly 1L

• September 26, 2022
• 8 minutes
• automation, home assistant, inspiration, personal, tech

Once I settled on jumping into home automation and Home Assistant (HA), the first "practical" thing I wanted to address was the issue of lights being left on at random throughout the house.

Jumping into Home Assistant: The Installation (and Hiccup) Process

• September 12, 2022
• 6 minutes
• automation, home assistant, inspiration, personal, tech

About a month ago, I took the plunge.

After considering it for a long time and hearing about some cool stuff folks were doing with home automation, I decided it was time to start my own dabbling adventure. A warning to folks: home automation is a little bit like owning horses. There can be a bunch of expense in the process for little obvious reward.

Adding Push Notifications to the Tempest WeatherBot

• August 22, 2022
• 7 minutes
• automation, bots, inspiration, php, tech, weather

This is the "final" installment of my summer 2022 blog series about the development of my Slack Tempest WeatherBot.

Adding External Data to the Tempest WeatherBot

• August 08, 2022
• 5 minutes
• automation, bots, inspiration, php, tech, weather

This is the third in the short series of my journey building the Slack Tempest WeatherBot. In this post I'm walking through the steps to incorporate external data from the National Weather Service (NWS) API for alerts and forecast options.

Expanding Interactivity with the Tempest WeatherBot

• July 25, 2022
• 5 minutes
• automation, bots, inspiration, php, tech, weather

In the last post I wrote about the basics of building the Slack Tempest WeatherBot and its basic set of command arguments. This post builds on those commands with an overview of expanding the Slack interactivity by adding a bot app home tab.

Creating a Slack Bot for Tempest Weather Station

• July 11, 2022
• 5 minutes
• automation, bots, inspiration, php, tech, weather

In summer 2020, I picked up a WeatherFlow Tempest station...a purchase I'd been considering for the better part of a year. It's an awesome and compact little thing, and on the whole I've been super happy with it. In my location it tends to over-report rainfall as the haptic rain sensor is also sensitive to vibrations on the mounting point (a pole in my yard).

DMARC: Moving to a Monitor-As-Necessary State

• June 27, 2022
• 3 minutes
• inspiration, security, tech

After a year-and-a-half of implementation (mostly monitoring), it is time to switch to a 'steady' or 'monitor-as-necessary state' for all of my things DMARC. I've written about this journey before, with the last major summary in November, 2021.

Upgrading an Old Application to 21st Century Passwords

• June 13, 2022
• 7 minutes
• automation, inspiration, mistakes, php, security, tech

I have a confession to make: I've ignored a Really Bad Password Form on an inherited web application for about at least a decade too long.

I'm not proud, but every time I considered changing the password mechanism to something more modern (and more secure), decision paralysis would set in...in great part due to the design challenges I anticipated in quietly upgrading this for users of the app in question.

An MMS 2022 Recap

• May 23, 2022
• 4 minutes
• inspiration, tech

Two weeks out from the last MMSMOA and the technical overload hangover lingers on...but in a Good Way. This post isn't terribly original, but it's my own highlights/recap/pitch of MMS.

The MMSMOA Retweet Bot in Action

• May 09, 2022
• 8 minutes
• automation, bots, inspiration, php, tech, website

Hot on the heels of last week's triumphant return of the "MOA" edition of MMS, I'm writing up a post-conference review of my somewhat-accidental creation: the MMSMOA Retweet Bot.

I shared the bot's story with a number of folks during the conference, often while peddling the bot's stickers, but several folks also encouraged me to share the details via blog post as well so here it is!

In-Place Upgrade of WSL Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04

• April 25, 2022
• 5 minutes
• inspiration, mistakes, php, security, tech

About two months back (early March to be exact), I had the opportunity to finally deprecate some old versions of applications and packages due to planned retirements and upgrades. Most specifically a full-on move to PHP 7.4 was in sight, though there were other bits.

Improving DMARC Compliance: Authenticated SMTP Relay

• April 11, 2022
• 4 minutes
• automation, inspiration, php, security, tech, website

I've done a lot of server migrations for very unrelated reasons over the last six months or so. Many of these host applications that send emails, and I've implemented the basics to get them sending DMARC-compliant messages. This has generally been limited to DNS SPF records for each host configuration. Generally speaking, having SPF or DKIM compliance is 'enough' to get your messages not flagged as spam, though it can depend on the DMARC policy configuration.

LAMP to WAMP: Adventures in Server Migration

• March 28, 2022
• 11 minutes
• inspiration, php, tech, website

Server migrations are an inevitable task, but I found myself in a different than normal circumstance recently. A planned server stack retirement, combined with the server "owner's" technical capacity and expertise required a change in platform. Specifically, this shift meant moving from Linux to Windows.

Certbot on Windows: Automation Is Possible

• March 14, 2022
• 6 minutes
• automation, certbot, inspiration, security, tech, website

A recent project gave me an opportunity to try out Certbot on Windows. As I've written about before, I've had an extensive journey with Certbot, at times in fairly 'non-standard' configurations, and Certbot on Windows is no different.

Revisiting Key Authentication Setups

• February 28, 2022
• 6 minutes
• automation, inspiration, security, tech

Nearly 18 months ago I wrote about setting up and using key authentication to connect between hosts. I use it all the time and it's a major timesaver on all sorts of levels.

Moving an Old Website to Github Pages: Creating a Finished Product

• February 14, 2022
• 9 minutes
• inspiration, tech, website

 In the last post I wrote about the process of creating the layout and the challenges through the content conversion and basic layout stages.

Moving an Old Website to Github Pages: Getting Started

• January 31, 2022
• 11 minutes
• inspiration, tech, website

Nearly 25 years ago I spun up a website featuring transcriptions of Monty Python material collected from college students in the 1980s. I don't remember how I came across the archive of these text files, but I still have the originals in part of my personal digital archive. Around the year 2000 I moved the website (and subsequently added more content) into a Wiki system (TWiki, to be exact).

Drupal Site Improvements and other Housekeeping

• January 17, 2022
• 8 minutes
• drupal, inspiration, tech, website

On the heels of (and riding the wave following) my recent migration of Drupal to a new server host, I decided it was well past time to finally address some things with my Drupal instance that were been bugging me for a long time.

Moving a Legacy Drupal Stack to a New Server Host

• January 03, 2022
• 10 minutes
• drupal, inspiration, php, security, sql, tech, website

One of my "end of 2021 break" projects was a planned "lift and shift" of my primary Drupal instance to a fresh, sparkly new web host stack. The stack on which it resided was reaching end of life and for a few other reasons it was time to make the change. In preparation, over the last year or so I've been de-coupling and untangling some of the baggage that had accumulated on the old server and its structure over time.

Reconciling Disparate Datasets

• December 06, 2021
• 8 minutes
• inspiration, php, tech

A few weeks ago I was asked to help update a centralized inventory dataset, which to us is definitely a "tertiary" system. Several hundred device records were associated with our part of the organization, and every time I opened the list I quickly "noped" out of doing anything with it. But the time came when I needed to actually do something with it lest I wind up on someone's naughty list.