Essays

I've been writing and publishing essays on this site since 2010. Here they are, gathered into topics. If you'd like to see them chronologically check out the full archive.

Best Of (start here)

Backyard Fiber: A journey through setting up a fiberoptic network backbone at my hosue.
DNS: The Good Parts: Dig through the DNS and learn how and why it all works.
Automatic Finances: My personal finance system that I haven't had to change since setting it up in 2018.
Program your Finances: Command-line Accounting: All about my financial journey, from debt-ridden towards debt-free. More importantly, this is a very basic introduction to how to use ledger to keep track of your finances. This has been described as the best introduction to ledger out there.

3D Printing

2023-09-19 - Using a Secondary Klipper for Printer Power Control

Book Reviews

2013-06-09 - Book Review: The Box
2013-05-25 - Book Review: Tubes: a Journey to the Center of the Internet

Business

2018-06-04 - Notes on Shutting Down an S-Corp
2017-06-07 - Adventures in Stock Picking
2017-05-15 - My Miniature Corporate Empire
2015-11-23 - Does an LLC protect me from a personal injury lawsuit?
2015-08-31 - Organizing Your Consulting Business
2015-05-08 - Pay Your Taxes!
2014-11-25 - What is the best modern payment provider?
2014-09-08 - Five business lessons from an idle game
2011-09-04 - Bootstrapping a Side Business - First Steps

DNS

2014-12-01 - Your DNS Provider Should Not Be Your Registrar
2014-08-21 - Fix Your Email Deliverability with DMARC
2013-07-19 - DNS: The Good Parts
2013-06-07 - How and why I'm not running my own DNS
2012-12-31 - How I run my own DNS servers

Email

2015-01-07 - DKIM Deep Dive
2015-01-05 - SPF: Sunscreen for your Email
2014-12-31 - Email: The Good Parts

Finance

2024-07-31 - Automatic Finances
2024-07-31 - Automatic Cash Management
2024-07-31 - Automatic Investing
2019-02-19 - Automatic Insurance
2015-06-17 - Program Your Finances: Algorithmic Savings
2015-04-08 - Program Your Finances: Envelope Budgeting
2012-01-01 - A Robust Reporting System for Ledger
2011-12-18 - Program Your Finances: Automated Transactions
2011-08-04 - Program Your Finances: Vacation Tracking
2011-07-09 - Program your Finances: Reporting for Fun and Profit
2010-05-23 - Program your Finances: Command-line Accounting

Hardware

2013-05-17 - Mounting a Magic Trackpad on a Kinesis Advantage Keyboard
2011-09-11 - Quadrotor Update 3
2011-09-09 - Quadrotor Update Part 2
2011-09-05 - Quadrotor Update
2011-04-24 - Quadrotor Motors Are Alive!
2011-02-15 - I Soldered Something!

Home Automation

2024-08-12 - Using ESPHome Without the Home Assistant Addon
2024-06-15 - ESPHome Server in Python
2024-05-02 - The Simply Complicated Automatic Sprinkler
2024-01-08 - Using a Static JSON File in Home Assistant
2023-11-28 - Using Eufy Permanent Outdoor Lights with WLED

Home Improvement

2023-06-05 - Backyard Fiber Update 2
2023-04-19 - Backyard Fiber Update 1
2023-03-31 - Backyard Fiber

Home Lab

2022-09-21 - Homeprod Management with Docker Compose
2022-03-18 - Z-Wave Controllers using Dell Wyse Thin Clients

Networking

2022-08-12 - Setting up an isolated work VLAN with VyOS
2021-11-24 - My Virtualized Router
2014-09-14 - Building a Private Backplane Network for your VPSs with ZeroTier
2013-01-27 - Increasing the Encryption Noise Floor

Personal

2025-01-17 - Goodbye, TikTok

Politics

2016-11-10 - We (Probably) Have Two Years of ACA Left

Programming

2022-05-27 - Ruby Service Objects with Sorbet
2019-03-13 - Using Que instead of Sidekiq
2018-06-05 - An Open Licensing Organization for Open Source Software

Software

2020-05-21 - Tiller, Ledger, and Sorbet
2018-09-13 - Using Let's Encrypt Without certbot
2018-08-30 - What is a CDN and why do I need one?
2018-08-20 - My Own Private CDN
2018-04-29 - Why your SaaS application should support SAML
2016-05-22 - Archiving Websites with Wget
2014-08-13 - Know How To Roll (Your SSL Certificates)
2014-08-04 - Command Line Faxing
2014-05-30 - Start a VirtualBox VM at Boot on Mac OS X
2014-03-16 - Self-hosted Git Server
2014-03-06 - Using the Mailchimp API for Sales
2013-12-15 - A Practical Exercise in Web Scraping
2013-12-05 - Simple Git-backed Microsites
2013-12-02 - Simulating a Market in Ruby
2013-11-12 - Little Data: How do we query personal data?
2013-10-19 - Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
2013-09-22 - DRY your Rails CRUD with Simple Form and Inherited Resources
2013-09-15 - Essential Tools for Starting a Rails App in 2013
2013-06-18 - Making eBooks with Docverter
2013-06-15 - Page Viewer, a Simple Markdown Viewer
2013-05-30 - Design for Failure: Processing Payments with a Background Worker
2013-05-10 - Distributed Personal Wiki
2013-01-09 - Full Text Search with Whistlepig
2012-12-30 - Deploy 12-Factor Apps with Capistrano::Buildpack
2012-11-11 - Deploying a 12-Factor App with Capistrano
2012-11-05 - Run Anything on Heroku with Custom Buildpacks
2012-10-27 - Private Git Repositories with Gitolite and S3
2012-10-20 - On-the-fly Markdown Conversion to PDF and Docx
2012-09-08 - Keeping a Programming Journal with Marginalia
2012-08-11 - Task-oriented Dotfiles
2012-05-17 - Dokuen, a Personal App Platform
2011-11-30 - Another Tiny Webapp
2011-11-27 - Concurrency on Heroku Cedar
2010-08-22 - Perl with a Lisp
2010-08-08 - Managing Your Processes with ProcLaunch.
2010-08-01 - Daemons are Our Picky, Temperamental Friends
2010-06-02 - Data Mining "Lost" Tweets
2010-05-30 - Iterating Elements in boost::tuple, template style
2010-05-27 - Everyone Needs Goals
2010-05-16 - Building Battle Bots with Clojure
2010-05-12 - Actionable Information
2010-05-09 - Moose vs Mouse and OOP in Perl
2010-04-08 - Calorific, a Simple Calorie Tracker

Stripe

2014-11-20 - Stripe removed SSLv3 support. Here's how to fix the HTTP 401 errors.
2014-11-17 - Payola v1.2: Now with Subscriptions
2014-11-11 - Building Payola Extensions
2014-10-20 - Introducing Payola
2014-05-07 - Stripe Account Balances for Service Credits
2014-03-30 - Using Stripe Checkout for Subscriptions
2014-01-20 - The Life of a Stripe Charge
2013-09-03 - Adventures in Self Publishing
2013-07-02 - Shipping with Stripe and EasyPost

Updates

2018-08-15 - VMSave has made over 10,000 calls
2015-09-22 - One Thousand Days
2015-09-17 - New Book: Handle Your Business
2014-09-02 - Let's Begin Again
2013-08-15 - Mastering Modern Payments Is Out Today!
2013-07-15 - Announcing: Mastering Modern Payments: Using Stripe with Rails
2013-06-06 - Cancer
2013-06-02 - Blog Relocation
2013-05-24 - New Blog Design
2012-11-23 - Docverter is now Open Source
2012-09-03 - Marginalia: A web-based journaling and note taking tool
2012-05-29 - Dokuen 0.0.8, Now with Linux Support
2012-05-20 - Dokuen Update
2011-12-14 - Yet Another (not very) Static Blog Generator
2011-11-17 - Introducing FivePad
2011-10-19 - What sucks about apartment hunting?
2011-10-08 - Remindlyo is a Go
2011-09-25 - Random Remindlyo Things
2011-04-15 - ProcLaunch v1.2
2011-03-04 - ProcLaunch Improvements and v1.1
2010-09-23 - ProcLaunch v1.0
2010-08-06 - Blog Generator Updates
2010-03-29 - Adding RSS and Other Things
2010-03-28 - Yet Another Static HTML Blog