I'm a 34 year old UIUC Computer Engineer building mobile apps, websites and hardware integrations with an interest in 3D printing, biotechnology and Arduinos.
AWS EC2 + Wireguard
I’m a fan of not leaving common ports like 22 (SSH) or 3306 (MySQL DB) open to the public but really like being able to access those ports from my laptop. I used to use security groups and limit access by IP to my home network. Now, most consumer internet is not static IP but I find providers like comcast do not change the IP very [...]
Matomo SMTP through Amazon SES
If you are self-hosting a matomo analytic instance, you may consider using Amazon SES to send the actual emails for password resets and scheduled reports. Getting the settings right can be a little painful though. Note: Make sure to create your SMTP credentials in a region that has full email support, I normally use us-east-2 [...]
Most Popular Mastodon Instances
One of the hard parts of getting started on Mastodon is trying to pick what instance you want to create your account on. Once created you can access the entire federated universe but much like old email addresses in the past (you know before everyone mostly uses gmail now), the server you pick will be visible after your username. (Feel [...]
7zip CLI to Generate sha256 Checksum File
On Windows you have a nice option to right click on a file and have 7zip generate a sha256 file that sits next to the file. I wanted to script up a linux file server to go through and find all iso files and place the sha256 hash next to it. As you can see from the menu, its not the easiest thing to get to. But with this script you can [...]
Add fa-mastodon to Older Font Awesome
If you went to use the fa-mastodon but instead got a blank glyph, chances are you are running an old Font Awesome. The best fix is to just upgrade to Font Awesome v5.0.11 or higher but sometimes you are working on apps that make the best path difficult to actually do. For example, this site uses a third party theme which is [...]
CLI Fix Audio Level on Video Files
Sometimes you have video files that have very quiet audio and this simple command line bash script will find how much gain it can add to the file without clipping and apply it for you. fix-audio-levels <filename> Install To install this simply run (ideally in a folder that is in your path like /usr/local/bin or ~/bin if you have [...]
Improve WikiJS Search
Out of the box, wikijs uses the “Database – Basic” as its search option which works ok for simple content but there are better options that you can enable. I recommend switching to ElasticSearch, it will greatly improve the search quality and the overall user experience of finding content in wikijs. When using basic or [...]
