Blog • Chris Dzombak

… has too many hobbies.

Latest — 25 Nov 2025

Linux server migration planning

If you run some number of Linux servers for yourself you'll inevitably need to migrate one to a new machine at some point. This might be straightforward, particularly if you can do so by migrating a VM image or if you treat your personal servers like cattle, not …

Featured Posts ★

Getting Good Results from Claude Code: Writing Good Prompts

Key to getting good results from Claude Code (and similar LLM programming tools) is writing good prompts. This is one area where your own programming expertise comes into play; you need to use it to provide guidance to the LLM and nudge it in the right direction. Good prompts are …

Give your LLM Coding Tools Their Own Tools

Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows LLMs to call "tools" that can do anything: interact with your filesystem, search the Web, hit an external API, or even help guide the LLM through a structured problem-solving process. A single MCP server provides one or more tools; for example, a research …

Getting Good Results from Claude Code

I've been experimenting with LLM programming agents over the past few months. Claude Code has become my favorite. It is not without issues, but it's allowed me to write ~12 programs/projects in relatively little time, and I feel I would not have been able to …

Navigating and Rewriting Legacy Systems

As I'm navigating this job search process, I've been asked several variants of the questions, "how do you work with a legacy or poorly-documented codebase? how would you rewrite one?" I figure this answer might be useful for others.

Quick Devops Tool: gha-secrets-setup

Here's a small script I wrote a few days ago, gha-secrets-setup. This script accepts a GitHub repository URL and checks its GitHub Actions workflows for secrets references. Then, using the gh CLI tool, it checks which secrets haven't yet been configure. It interactively prompts you for …

Use Your Type System

Today I'm discussing a trivially simple technique that I've rarely seen used in production codebases. In programming, we often need to deal with simple values that can be represented by simple, generic types built into our programming language or provided by libraries: types like integer, string, …

Recent Posts

Neat Image noise profiles for the Ricoh WG6

I have developed a set of Neat Image noise profiles for the Ricoh WG6 underwater camera. These cover JPEG images straight out of camera. ISO: 125, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400 Image Tones: Bright, Natural, Vibrant, Slide Film, Monochrome Other settings: Large image size, sharpening: standard, saturation: standard, contrast: …

Neat Image noise profiles for the Leica X1

I’ve developed Neat Image noise profiles for the Leica X1 camera. These cover JPEG images straight out of the camera. ISO: 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200 Film presets: Standard, Vivid, Natural, B&W Natural, B&W High Contrast Other settings: 12.2MP resolution, JPEG super fine, …

Beavers at work in West Lake Nature Preserve

Following my success capturing images of beavers at work in Dexter earlier this week, I've finally captured some photos & video I'm really happy with! This time at West Lake Preserve in Washtenaw County: …

Using systemd to keep an SMB share mounted

It's possible to use systemd to keep a SMB share mounted and retry it after the mount fails. This template-based approach scales relatively easily to multiple mounts. Create the retry service template In /etc/systemd/system/mount-retry@.service: [Unit] Description=Retry mounting %i After=network-online.target Wants=network-online. …

Using systemd to run a Docker container only when an SMB mount is mounted

I have a Linux machine that mounts several shares from my NAS via Samba. I'd like it to run fscrawler in a Docker container for each of those shares, but only when the shares are working properly — if the share goes away while fscrawler is running, fscrawler will …

Beavers in Dexter, MI

I've been meaning to write something about this for quite a while now. It's been over a century since beavers in our area were hunted & trapped so extensively that you could easily go your entire life without seeing any sign of one. Over the past …

Automatically sort trail camera images with trailcamai

For the past year or so I've been occasionally placing trail cameras in an attempt to get interesting photos of coyotes, beavers, and other animals out doing their thing. (Unfortunately I've mostly achieved photos of deer and other less-interesting animals, but eventually I'll get …

pdate.dzdz.cz: A website for pdate

Regular readers may recall my recent post about pdate, my CLI date/time parsing tool. I felt inspired to learn a bit about WASM and make a website for pdate, powered by the very same, well-tested, parsing code that powers the CLI tool. That website is now ready and free …

Not everything in your todo list needs to be a proper GTD Next Action

In GTD, the “next action” is “the most immediate physical, visible activity that would be required to move the situation toward closure,” and in the GTD system next actions are of critical importance. In my experience there’s effectively a binary: either a project has a well-defined next action, or …

pdate: Date/Time Parsing for Programmers, DevOps, and SRE

Software developers encounter a lot of timestamps. These timestamps vary in format and human-readability — some might follow RFC3339, while others might be Unix timestamps (in seconds, nanoseconds, or something else) or embedded within ULIDs. In my experience, particularly during an incident, it's valuable to be able to quickly …

AlfredSwitchWindows now supports Ghostty tabs

I recently switched to using Ghostty as my macOS terminal emulator, which has involved adjusting & rewriting various tools I use day-to-day. One such tool is AlfredSwitchWindows, which allows searching your open windows and tabs. GitHub - cdzombak/AlfredSwitchWindows: Alfred (macOS) workflow to search for & switch to open windows …

#latergram: Wild Birds at the Detroit Zoo, April 2024

The Detroit Zoo features a wild colony of Black-Crowned Night Herons, and this gallery features a number of photos of them — the first time I've ever seen one on the wild! …

#latergram: Bird Photos from Kensington Metropark, July 2025

ℹ️ This post doubles as a testing ground for a new feature I'm developing for the open-source Lychee photo gallery software. …

A Tool for Working with Git Worktrees

Git worktrees have received a fair amount of press recently, since Claude Code et al. encourage using them when you're running multiple agents in parallel (to keep them from conflicting with each other). I've found this useful, but working with Git worktrees directly is somewhat cumbersome. …