Michigan COVID Vaccine Links

The COVID-19 vaccine rollout appears to be a disorganized mess. Here, in no particular order, are some helpful links for people in Michigan (and particularly in Washtenaw County): * Washtenaw County COVID-19 Vaccination Form * Washtenaw County COVID-19 page * Meijer COVID-19 Vaccine Clinic Info / Registration * Rite-Aid Vaccine Scheduler * CVS Appointments * Walgreens Vaccine …

Deferred Tasks, Project Templates, and More: Customizing Things with AppleScript

In this post, I share some AppleScripts I use to implement additional features in the Things to-do app: OmniFocus-style deferred tasks, project templates that live in the Bear notes app, and more.

Now: Feb. 2021

Reading: As I was last month, I’m still working through and enjoying Barack Obama’s A Promised Land; I’m about halfway through it now. I’m also reading Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner, a 1990s-era dive into the history of the Internet and its predecessor, …

Redirecting Hacker News traffic away from your site via Nginx configuration

If you wish to redirect traffic from Hacker News away from your site for some reason, placing these nginx configuration directives in your site’s server { block will do this trick. This won’t work inside a location block, at least in my experience. This snippet was last updated December …

Why I use Arq instead of restic for macOS backups

I recently finished upgrading all my Macs to the long-awaited version 7 release of my preferred backup software, Arq. I use it to backup all my Macs and Windows computers to the cloud storage provider Wasabi, which is inexpensive relative to eg. AWS S3. I use the open-source backup software …

Ship electricity usage data from an Energy Bridge to InfluxDB

Part of the Home Energy and Environment Monitoring series. A while back, I signed up for DTE Energy’s Insight feature, which lets you monitor your home’s electricity usage in real time (and natural gas usage, but only at one-day resolution). To make this work, they ship you a …

Replacing iTunes, Music.app, iTunes Match, and iCloud Music Library

Part of the Project Logs series. More follow-up from my recent “Now” post: I’ve finally (mostly) extricated my music library from the entirety of Apple’s music ecosystem. This post documents how and why I did that. The Problems A long, long time ago, I used iTunes to play …

Securing my personal SSH infrastructure with Yubikeys

One recently-completed project I mentioned in January’s “Now” post was locking down SSH in my personal computing infrastructure using Yubikeys. In this post, I’ll outline my goals, the strategy I took, and the problems and solutions I ran into along the way.

Using Flickr Again

As I mentioned in my recent “Now” post, I was considering starting to use Flickr again, since I didn’t have anywhere public to share photos and screenshots. A day or two after that post, I decided to use Flickr, and I’ve started to post new stuff to my …

Letters of Recommendation: Where to start with Peter F. Hamilton, Mastodon iPhone apps, and Domain Registrars

Friends have sent me a few questions related to my “Now” post from yesterday, and I have one other service I’d like to mention. Do I have a Peter F. Hamilton recommendation to start? Good question. For a good sci-fi space opera, I think I would start with his …

Now, Jan. 2021

For a while now, I haven’t felt very much like blogging. This isn’t unusual; looking at my posting history on this site it’s clear that I tend to post in spurts lasting somewhere from one to four years. In the past this was largely because I got …

A lightweight service health check tool written in Bash

cdzombak/lightweight-healthcheck is an easy-to-use (and deploy) service health check tool, written entirely in Bash.

Simple programs that make Things.app better

Introducing two small programs which I use to improve my daily life with the personal task manager, Things.

Introducing Runner: a lightweight wrapper for cron jobs

Part of the Project Announcements series. It’s been a while since I blogged anything here, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t done anything in the past couple years! Over the next months, I’m going to try to make some posts about the various projects I’ve …

Letter to Ann Arbor City Council regarding the failed Y Lot vote

Last night, ahead of publishing on Damn Arbor this morning’s editorial on the role of campaign contributions in Monday’s Y Lot vote, I sent the following email to all members of City Council: I was disappointed that Council failed to pass this resolution last night. In my view, …