Marc's Mind | Software, Side Projects, and Decades of Building Things

The Manual Process Is The Point

Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Earlier this week on a Reddit thread I was discussing Caffeinated Checkbook. Someone pointed out that “every banking app does this, so why does anyone need it?” It’s a fair question. Every bank has an app, and there are many similar apps such as Credit Karma, YNAB, Quicken Simplifi, and many others. They all show you your transactions, pull in your data, and categorize your spending automatically. So why would anyone bother typing transactions in manually?

Because entering the transactions manually is the whole point.

The Industry Decided to Harvest Users. I Decided to Build for Myself.

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

I started writing code in 1981 on a Commodore VIC-20. I was 11 years old.

Not because I had a plan, not because I saw a career path, I was only 11 after all, but because computers were the most interesting thing I’d ever encountered. I couldn’t stop thinking about them and the endless possibilities that they represented. By the time I was 14 I was writing BBS software and had landed my first paid programming job through the early online community. This was before the internet as most people know it existed. Before the web. Before email was something normal people had. Just modems, phone lines, and a community of people who thought computers were worth staying up until 3am for.

Caffeinated Checkbook: A Notebook That Does Math

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

I used GnuCash religiously from around 2005 until 2011. Every transaction, every account, credit cards, the works. I was the kind of person who reconciled to the penny every month and felt vaguely anxious if I didn’t.

Then life had other plans.

Caffeinated Notes: A Digital Steno Pad

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Since I started writing code in the early 80s I’ve always had a notebook with me. In high school and college it was a spiral notebook. I’d sit in the cafeteria between classes with a cup of coffee and literally write code by hand to transcribe and edit when I got home. At the office it was a steno pad. Once I wasn’t in school, it was just the steno pad. I used to buy them in bulk at Costco.

The steno pad stuck around for decades. Smaller than a spiral notebook, the top spiral meant flipping pages didn’t cover my keyboard or mouse. No organization system, no hierarchy, no folders. Just notes, most recent at the bottom, flip through to find what you need. It worked. I still have a desk drawer with half a dozen steno pads in it.

That’s what I wanted to build.

Caffeinated Vitals: My Doctor Asked for My Numbers

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0800

What happens when a doctor gives instructions to an arguably neuro-spicy middle-aged developer and said developer can’t find an app that suits them?

They write their own of course.

Caffeinated Calendar: A Calendar App Born Out of Frustration

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0800

I’ve been self-hosting my own calendar infrastructure for a while now. CalDAV, Radicale, the whole stack. It works. But the one thing I could never get right was the client. Every calendar app I tried either wanted me to route everything through their servers, locked me into a single ecosystem, or just didn’t handle shared calendars well.

So I built one.

A Jury Duty Scam

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0700

New month, new scam attempt. I’m certain this is also because I’ve put my number out there a lot recently, but today I got a call from someone claiming to be a sheriff from my actual county.

It started out with him announcing that he was from the [Actual] County Sheriff’s office, his name, and his badge number very quickly. He followed up by telling me that the reason for his call was that I missed a scheduled jury duty appearance today. The “sheriff” knew my name and county, but those are both public record for anyone willing to look.

I Was Targeted by Two Sophisticated LinkedIn Pig Butchering Scams in the Same Week

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0700

Over the past few months, I’ve been increasing my visibility — more blogging, more conversation on LinkedIn, and generally showing up again after some time off. It was paying off: more profile views, more engagement, more conversations.

With additional visibility to actual people, that same visibility increased for scammers. They’ve always been part of life, but this time they showed up looking polished, professional, and perhaps even dangerously convincing.

Replacing Todoist with a Self-Hosted CalDAV Setup

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0700

Update (April 2026): Since writing this post, I built Caffeinated Calendar, which connects directly to Radicale and any CalDAV server alongside Google, iCloud, Outlook, and Zoho. It has full CalDAV task support and replaced both OneCalendar and Tasks.org for me. The Radicale setup below still applies. Jump to the update.

Update (May 2026): Since my last update, I’ve completely uninstalled Tasks.org from my phone, and replaced it with Caffeinated Calendar. Last week I released v1.3.0 of Calendar (release notes) that was focused on Tasks and To-Dos. I’m still using Radicale as the backend, so the rest of this setup (everything except the client section) still applies. Jump to the update.

I’ve been gradually replacing various commercial and/or closed source cloud services with self-hosted alternatives. I’ll start posting about more of them in the very near future, but the one I decided to replace this weekend was Todoist.

A Self-Hosted Contact Form for Static Sites

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 -0700

Static sites are great. They’re fast, secure, easy to deploy, and scale better than just about anything else. What they don’t do well, though, is anything dynamic that requires a web service. The most ubiquitous example of this is the contact form.

Why I Moved from Enpass to Bitwarden (via Vaultwarden)

Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 -0700

For years, I was a satisfied paid user of Enpass. It was simple, reliable, offered a one-time purchase model that respected the idea of software ownership, and best of all, worked everywhere that I worked – Linux, MacOS, Android, and iOS all synced with WebDAV.

Choosing the Wrong Tool Isn't the Tool's Fault

Tue, 13 May 2025 00:00:01 +0107

I originally wrote a version of this for Caffeinated Softworks, but the topic struck close enough to home that I wanted to share an edited version of it here too.

A recent piece titled “Why Developers are Quietly Quitting Golang” has been making the rounds. It references a Medium post where a startup founder says that choosing Go (Golang) was “the biggest mistake of [their] life.”

Terms of Use

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0700

Terms of Use

This site, marclewis.com, is a personal blog. By accessing and using this website, you agree to the following terms:

No Guarantees: The information on this site is provided “as is.” I make no guarantees as to the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any content. Use at your own risk.

Privacy Policy

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0700

Privacy Policy

This site, marclewis.com, is a personal blog. I take privacy seriously and aim to be transparent about what is and isn’t collected when you visit.

What this site collects

Analytics: I use privacy-friendly analytics (currently Umami) to understand traffic patterns. No personally identifiable information is collected or stored.
Comments: When you leave a comment via Commento+, your name, email, and comment content are stored. Commento+ is self-hosted and does not share your data with third parties.
Server Logs: Basic access logs are kept for debugging and security. These logs are not used for tracking and are not shared.

What this site does not do

No third-party trackers or advertising
No selling, renting, or sharing of personal information
No email marketing or newsletter signups

Contact

If you have any questions or concerns about privacy, feel free to reach out using the contact page or email me directly.

School Bag

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 15:40:24 +0600

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren.

Blue Jacket

Sat, 14 Mar 2020 15:40:24 +0600

Cotton T-Shirt

Sat, 14 Mar 2020 15:40:24 +0600

Linen Bag

Sat, 14 Mar 2020 15:40:24 +0600

Pink T-Shirt

Sat, 14 Mar 2020 15:40:24 +0600

Side Bag

Sat, 14 Mar 2020 15:40:24 +0600

Travel Carrier

Sat, 14 Mar 2020 15:40:24 +0600

Travel Bag

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 15:40:24 +0600

EmberJS, VueJS, React, Angular, etc. Which one to choose?

Tue, 04 Jun 2019 18:35:29 +0100

For the last couple of years, I’ve been dabbling with a few side/hobby projects. Several of these have been in the form of a Single Page App (SPA). There is a lot of appeal to that with the modern web. The question always comes up, though, which framework should I use to create my new app?

I Want To Play

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 17:33:50 +0100

So I’ve been working on bringing a new project to light in my spare time over the last few years, dittos.io. It is a communications platform for teachers to more effectively communicate with parents. The goal is to build stronger communities and hopefully create more parental involvement. We recently launched the website, and the app will be available soon.

Dead Synology DS1515+

Mon, 27 Nov 2017 23:10:31 +0100

So last March I purchased a Synology DS1515+ and wrote about it in one of my posts “Who Shall Control My Media? Part 4 - Backend Storage”and up until this weekend, it had been performing very well.

Paid Memberships Pro Require CVV/CVC When Using Stripe

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 18:52:04 +0100

Paid Memberships Pro is a great WordPress plugin that allows paid subscriptions to your WordPress site. It has tons of features and is incredibly flexible with handling subscriptions.

Sony DualShock 4 USB Wireless Adapter Controller Pairing

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 19:42:06 +0100

It took me way too long to figure this out, but there is no documentation at all on Sony’s store website, and google kept referring me to Windows 10 setups. We’re running a Windows 7 gaming setup, so things are quite a bit different. I’m putting there here so others might have something so search for.

Google WiFi Review

Sat, 07 Jan 2017 17:16:08 +0100

Google WiFi promises an attractive, easy to setup, easy to manage, and relatively inexpensive home router that is mesh capable. Mesh networks help to eliminate “dead spots” in larger homes or homes with too many obstacles for strong WiFi coverage from a single router. It also promises simple parental control and the ability to easily disable kids internet access.

HexBug Vex Robotics Spider Review

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 04:41:12 +0100

Our oldest son has been wanting one of these since he first saw them. We’ve got several of the HexBugs already, including HexBug nanos, beetles, spiders, larvae, fish and tarantulas. He also loves Lego and K’nex toys. Imagine how excited he was when his sister got him the Vex Robotics Spider for Christmas. It was the first thing he wanted to open and build because BIG, ROBOT, BATTLE.

Great Northern Popcorn Lincoln Popper Review

Sat, 24 Dec 2016 05:30:00 +0100

I love popcorn. Always have. Its one of those things from childhood that provides fond memories and an overall sense of happiness to me. My boys also love popcorn. About once a month we do a “movie night” where we spend a Saturday afternoon watching a movie, having a “carpet picnic” and all watch a movie together. Our movie nights are one of those things that I hope will provide that same sense of happiness to my kids when they are adults.

Asus ZenPad S 8 Review

Sun, 18 Dec 2016 22:18:45 +0100

After using an Nvidia Shield tablet for a year or so, and dealing with a battery recall and then an RMA because it would no longer hold a charge after only 3 months, I decided to try something different. The Shield is an impressive tablet, and the original version even more so. I would still recommend it for anyone who is serious about mobile gaming, but the average battery life and weight of the tablet itself made me want to find something more suited to my usage patterns. So I started looking…

D-Link DSP-W110 Wi-Fi Smart Plug Review

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 04:30:16 +0100

For the last few months, I’ve had a D-Link DSP-W110 sitting in a drawer. I bought it when it was on sale, and have been meaning to compare it to the TP-Link HS100 smart plugs. Having put up our Christmas tree yesterday, I thought that now was the perfect time to pull it out of the drawer, set it up and tie it in to our “smart home” via the Amazon Echo.

A Few Thoughts on Tablets

Sat, 10 Dec 2016 16:48:26 +0100

I’ve been through quite a few Android tablets since they first hit the market a few years back. I started with the incredibly well built T-Mobile branded Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. I actually still have this tablet and it still works. This particular tablet was during Samsung’s early days in the Android smartphone and tablet market. It is built like a tank, very solid construction despite it being plastic. Holding this device and then holding a new Samsung tablet makes the newer Samsung tablets feel very flimsy and fragile. Samsung’s choice of materials since they became popular has been one of the reasons I’ve shied away from them, that and their TouchWiz UI. which I’m not a fan at all. Luckily there are quite a few other tablets on the market to choose from, but how to choose from the many other options?

Who Shall Control My Media? Part 5 - Back Ends and Front Ends

Sat, 19 Nov 2016 16:59:18 +0100

Since the Media Players post, I’ve been working on refining our setup and getting it to the point where I can stop tinkering with it and just leave it be to run. I believe I’m finally close to that point. With that in mind, here is the last post in this series, covering all of the back end servers and front end players and everything that goes in between.

Who Shall Control My Media? Part 4 - Backend Storage

Sun, 16 Oct 2016 18:52:22 +0100

So you’ve got a lot of videos, home movies, pictures, etc., that you want to have access to from all of your devices and get them on your big screen. Sounds simple, right? Its anything but. With the huge amount of competition and proprietary solutions out there it can be very confusing and extremely frustrating trying to figure out what the “best” solution is.

Could this be the beginning of the end for software patents?

Thu, 13 Oct 2016 01:39:28 +0100

http://fortune.com/2016/10/03/software-patents/?_utm_source=1-2-2

This is big.

My first few days with the OnePlus 3

Sun, 26 Jun 2016 15:36:55 +0100

I didn’t really want a new phone but my HTC One M9 was starting to really irritate me. Specifically the battery and power usage. It got to the point where I was having to charge it at least 3 times a day or I would run out of power. I was able to watch the battery tick down two percentage points just by having the phone on and looking at the home screen. Not doing anything or running any apps, just having the screen on. Between 6:30am and 11am my battery was down to 30%. Not acceptable. This has been going on for about a month now.

Who Shall Control My Media? Part 3 - Media Players

Sat, 18 Jun 2016 20:09:24 +0100

Media players are a interesting topic. Over the past couple of years, we’ve tried a variety of them. The first one was back in 2007 and was the D-Link MediaLounge DSM-520 that got its media from a UPNP Media server. It was designed to fit into a home entertainment unit, the typical ~19 inches wide and looked a lot like a DVD player or VCR. At the time it was great. There was no metadata, though, just a list of files. Select one and it usually played just fine. It was a good product and nothing else even came close to it.

Redmine API and Jetbrains Integration

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 21:35:55 +0100

I just thought I would put this out there in case anyone else had the same problem as I did as there is surprisingly little out there.

I just recently switched back over to using Redmine from Jira, this time via a Docker image. Its nice and clean and avoids the various problems I was having with Apache and Passenger, which is partly what made me switch to Jira in the first place. After getting things all setup with various plugins and themes to make it look nice, I went back to work in PhpStorm. I then added a Task Server, tested the connection and all was fine.

Installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on Asus ZenBook UX501VW

Mon, 25 Apr 2016 18:30:28 +0100

UPDATE - Dec 1, 2018 - I’ve Finally installed Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on the Asus ZenBook UX501VW

First off, let me first say, what a nightmare this was. After the relative ease of installing Ubuntu 15.10 on the ZenBook I was more than a bit disappointed with how difficult it was installing Ubuntu 16.04.

Installing Ubuntu 15.10 on the Asus ZenBook Pro UX501VW, Redux

Sun, 27 Mar 2016 20:13:59 +0100

Update 2016-04-25, this post is obsolete. I now have information on installing Ubuntu 16.04 at https://marclewis.com/2016/04/25/installing-ubuntu-16-04-lts-on-asus-zenbook-ux501vw/

After writing about installing Ubuntu 14.04 on the ZenBook Pro I used it for about a month or so, but was not really happy with it. Nothing seemed quite right. Fonts were off, cursor sizes were off, applications didn’t look quite like they were supposed to, accelerated graphics didn’t quite work, etc. Don’t get me wrong, everything worked, but not as smoothly as I would have liked. So, I tried a few different things.

JetBrains IDEs, Haswell processors, Linux and FUTEX_WAIT

Wed, 16 Mar 2016 23:31:11 +0100

I thought I would put this here in case anyone else has been experiencing the same thing I have been. Start up a JetBrains product, any of them -- PhpStorm, WebStorm, CLion, DataGrip, or any of the others and it will start up, start indexing files, and then freeze. The only way to recover from it is to go to the command line and do a ‘kill -9’ on the process.

Power Supply for ASUS ZenBook UX501VW

Sat, 12 Mar 2016 21:29:59 +0100

After I purchased the new ASUS ZenBook, I went looking for another power supply for it, one to keep plugged in at my desk at the office, and another one for my backpack. One would think that would be easy to do, right? Not so.

ASUS decided to do something very odd, and rather stupid. They changed the size of the power tip for the power supply, but kept the same part number. I went through two different orders of the PA-1121-26 power supply and both of them had the wrong size tip. There is nowhere on the ASUS website to order a compatible one, and purchasing one from anywhere else will likely get you the wrong size tip.

Who shall control my media? Part 2 - Infrastructure

Sun, 28 Feb 2016 21:12:26 +0100

The infrastructure I’ve had our media setup on has changed quite a bit over the years, too. When I first started streaming stuff, I was using UPNP servers to serve a D-Link streamer. It worked pretty well for the first generation of this type of product. I used DiVX to encode our DVD collection, and things weren’t bad. I then migrated to MythTV and things were significantly better. It could handle more video containers, more codecs, and it could handle our recordings. We used nothing bug Myth until about 3 years ago, when I got a deal on a Sony streaming box. The Sony device was clunky and not fun to use, but it did let us stream Netflix. It was quickly replaced with a Roku 3 that I picked up at Costco when it was on sale. That was the beginning of the end for MythTV.

Who shall control my media? Part 1

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 21:09:45 +0100

Over the last couple of years, the entire media landscape has changed. We were quite happy with MythTV, but its pretty limited in its scope, it can only handle TV, Recorded TV, Videos, Music and Pictures that are on its local drives. Now, add in the fact that we’ve had a Roku now for a while, as well as played with the Fire TV stick and set top box, and things get more messy. I’ve been exploring and trying out a bunch of different options, and have started to settle in on one.

Installing Ubuntu on the ASUS ZenBook Pro UX501VW

Sun, 21 Feb 2016 21:24:36 +0100

Update 2016-04-25, this post is obsolete. I now have information on installing Ubuntu 16.04 at https://marclewis.com/2016/04/25/installing-ubuntu-16-04-lts-on-asus-zenbook-ux501vw/

After receiving my new ASUS ZenBook Pro UX501VW, the first thing I did was prepare it to dual boot between Windows 10 and Ubuntu. I’m not a fan of Windows at all, but I do understand that sometimes its required, so I need to dual boot.

TP-LINK HS100 WiFi Smart Plug and Amazon Echo First Impressions

Sat, 20 Feb 2016 20:07:34 +0100

With Jessica not being nearly as mobile any more, we decided it was time to start looking into a little bit of home automation. To start, we decided to just add a couple of controls for our lights. The TP-LINK HS100 WiFi Smart Plug seemed like a good way to get started as TP-LINK makes fairly decent products and they’re significantly less expensive than most of the others. The fact they say it works with the Echo makes it a no-brainer.

ASUS ZenBook Pro UX501VW Review

Sun, 14 Feb 2016 16:41:57 +0100

After three years of using my trusty Vaio laptop, the time had finally come to replace it. The Vaio has been a great laptop for me, but it was starting to show its age. When I bought the Vaio, its intended use was to be a desktop replacement when I wasn’t at the office. Its large 17.3" screen suited that purpose well. At the time I bought it we weren’t living in a place where we could setup a desktop computer at home, there simply wasn’t enough space. We’ve since moved and have the space for a desktop, so my laptop requirements have changed a bit.

LUKS Encrypted SSD under Ubuntu 14.04

Thu, 11 Feb 2016 22:03:30 +0100

So, after upgrading my laptop a couple weeks ago I found myself with a “spare” 960GB SSD from my old laptop. Since the new laptop uses an M.2 PCIE SSD and has no room for expansion, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to replace the WD Black hard drive I use as secondary storage in my office workstation.

Amazon FreeTime Unlimited - Great idea, bad implementation

Thu, 21 May 2015 23:50:05 +0100

Its no secret that I like Amazon and their services. There are a lot of things they do much better than their competition, but there are also quite a few things that could use some re-thinking.

Kindle Fire HD Kids Edition Tablet Review

Fri, 24 Apr 2015 19:32:52 +0100

Last fall, Amazon introduced its new Kindle Fire lineup, and we very excited by the new Fire HD Kids Edition Tablet for our soon to be 4 year old, Alex. We ordered it immediately and tucked it away for Alex’s birthday in December.

Amazon Fire Stick vs Roku 3

Thu, 16 Apr 2015 00:36:41 +0100

So back in December, Amazon was running a promo for Prime members to purchase the new Fire TV Stick for 50% off, making it just about $21 after tax. I couldn’t pass up that offer. After using it for a little while now, I figured I would give a review of it.

Software Design Principals - For Users

Wed, 15 Apr 2015 21:58:30 +0100

I’ve been chewing on this since the latest Android update hit Jessica and my phones, and I posted about it here. Basically, software design has gotten crazy over the last few years. With technology going mainstream, and most people carrying computers in their pockets in the form of a smartphone, software design is much less of an art form than a race. The problem as I see it, though, is they don’t know what they’re racing towards, other than to be first. There is nothing wrong with that, either. Though sometimes I wish developers could be just a bit more altruistic when they make their choices.

Dear Google, Stop it.

Wed, 15 Apr 2015 19:19:33 +0100

Dear Google,

Stop it.

Stop what, you ask? Stop being so damned arrogant. You’ve forgotten your own motto, “Don’t Be Evil” and you’ve missed sight of what made you the tech giant you are today.

Why I Just Bought a Nexus 7 2013

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 18:43:35 +0100

I’ve had a Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus for about three and a half years. Its been a great performer for me, and we’ve put it through a lot of abuse. We used it for watching movies, checking email, keeping our (then) toddler entertained, writing documents, and all the other things that tablets are great for. As one of the first generation Android tablets, it was pretty good. Its most compelling feature for me was that it was 3G enabled, so I didn’t need WiFi.

Oh, Comcast how I wish I could quit you

Tue, 24 Jun 2014 17:21:38 +0100

No, really, I wish I could quit you. Unfortunately, cable service is effectively a monopoly in most places. You’re the only company that can provide half way decent Internet speeds, and the only company that allows me to use a cable card for my MythTV setup.

Why, oh, why do you make it so painfully frustrating whenever you call in for any sort of issue? Your customer service people aren’t really trained to handle much more than telling people to reboot their cable boxes. And don’t even think about asking a question that isn’t answered by the script that they’re reading from.

Fixing My Parents Network Part 1

Tue, 17 Jun 2014 18:59:39 +0100

A couple months ago, my parents finally replaced their old Sony console TV (a tube TV) with a bright shiny new Samsung 60" Smart TV. Its a thing of beauty. The picture is crisp and sharp and has excellent color. Being one of Samsung’s Smart TV’s, it also has networking capabilities and can stream things from the Internet. It also has Netflix and Amazon Instant Video buttons right on the remote. It also includes an IR blaster to control the Comcast supplied DVR/cable box. Now they have just one remote, don’t have to change inputs or fiddle with things to stream movies and it has greatly simplified their setup. This is good because if its not easy to do and easy to remember, they won’t do it.

Yii2 vs Symfony2 - First Impressions

Sun, 18 May 2014 23:08:40 +0100

So a few weeks ago I started in on a ground-up rewrite of an existing project. Its currently using a framework that based around my CWFC libraries. It works very well, but its starting to show its age. As more and more features got added to the project, things have gotten more and more cumbersome to maintain in a clean way. I started off by ripping out all of the backend code and migrating it to C++ (see my posts on Protocol Buffers here and here), leaving only the front-facing code left to work with.

New Gaming Headset

Sat, 17 May 2014 23:02:27 +0100

So last week for my birthday, Jessica told me that I had to buy myself a present to open up in front of our oldest son. She wants to stress the importance that all birthdays aren’t about him (he’s three). I’d been looking at a new headset with microphone to use at the office for a few months now. After moving offices six weeks ago, I find myself in an office that is very noisy at times, and other times absolutely silent. Since they’re “executive suites”, the types of businesses that are in the offices around me varies. There are a couple of realtors, and a couple of recruiters. When they’re in the office, its loud with voices, otherwise its very quiet. Headphones are almost mandatory to focus on writing code.

Existing LUKS Partition and New Primary Boot Drive on Ubuntu 14.04

Sat, 03 May 2014 16:59:22 +0100

Yesterday I attempted to upgrade from Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04 on my office system. It failed. Everything appeared to go smoothly, but after rebooting, I got a black screen. No grub menu, no grub failure menu. I attempted to reinstall grub from a live image, but that failed too. I had an extra Intel 160GB SSD so I decided to a fresh install. Its been over a year since I did a clean install so I had a lot of cruft installed, so a clean install would take care of that, and would probably take less time than repairing the install.

Google Chromecast Review

Thu, 10 Apr 2014 00:31:08 +0100

With this week’s announcement of the Amazon Fire TV, I thought it would be a good time to review our Chromecast. Though I don’t see myself purchasing a Fire TV box, as we already have a Roku, there are quite a few comparisons against the Chromecast and the Roku both, so I thought I’d share our experiences with the Chromecast.

PhpStorm Simple Speedup

Tue, 01 Apr 2014 23:48:31 +0100

So, I’ve been working with JetBrains PhpStorm for about 6 months or so now. Only recently have I started forcing myself to serious work with it. Part of the reason why I used tabbed terminals and VIM for so many years is that it is very fast. No mouse clicking, my hands never need to leave the keyboard except to test what I’ve just written in a browser.

Cisco/Linksys ATA Exploit?

Tue, 12 Nov 2013 22:01:19 +0100

So I’ve encountered a strange exploit being attempted against the VoIP system I maintain. Its not actually against the softswitch, though, but rather against the end customer’s ATA. We first saw this particular exploit three or four months ago, and its a rather strange, but at the same time rather ingenious in its effectiveness.

Protocol Buffers and multiple inheritance

Fri, 01 Nov 2013 21:00:48 +0100

After I posted Google Protocol Buffers Where Have You Been All My Life, I started thinking about the multiple inheritance issue a bit more. After a couple of initial trials, I believed it wasn’t going to work. I kept thinking about that, became somewhat obsessed and needed to figure out why it wasn’t going to work.

Google Protocol Buffers, where have you been all my life?

Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:51:08 +0100

So two weeks ago I discovered Google’s Protocol Buffers, and I have to ask, where have you been all my life?

The project I was working on requires speed and scalability, both vertically and horizontally. The component I was working on is a C++ daemon that listens for HTTP requests and returns an XML document. It needs to be able to handle tens of thousands of requests per minute as its a control process. The first version of this application was written in PHP for speed of deployment and flexibility. Now that the product is mature, its time to go through some of the code and replace the PHP code with C++ code.

New Myth Frontend - Almost Perfect

Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:27:07 +0100

A few months ago we moved into a new place with a much smaller living room, it didn’t have nearly enough room for a full size computer case in the room. So it was time for a new, much smaller frontend for our MythTV setup.

Size, noise, and being able to “hide” it are the primary concerns with this new setup. The backend box is elsewhere and connected to the house network via a ZyXel 500Mbit powerline ethernet adapter. The new frontend is also connected via a ZyXel powerline ethernet switch. Wireless is an option, but its not stable enough or fast enough for me. There was another problem with wireless that I’ll mention later.

PHP Annotations are a Bad Idea

Fri, 25 Oct 2013 23:58:15 +0100

I’ve been writing code in PHP for a long time now, both for my own projects and as a freelancer. I’ve seen well written code and truly horrific code and everything in between. Much of the work I’ve done for my personal projects has been using a framework that I’ve built and added on over the years, my PHP Foundation Classes.

Code

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 23:05:46 +0100

Over the years, I’ve written a lot of code. I mean a lot. I’ve been going through some of it on and off and releasing some of it as open source. Some of it may be of general use to programmers, for others it may be a good reference for some things, but mostly its a way for me to organize things and keep a history.

Thanks for Reaching Out

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 23:05:46 +0100

Thank You!

Your message has been sent successfully.

I appreciate you taking the time to get in touch. I’ll do my best to respond soon. In the meantime, feel free to browse through the latest blog posts or check out what I’ve been up to.

Thanks again,

— Marc

Migrating from GFS to GlusterFS

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 19:43:25 +0100

This week I started the process of migrating from GFS to GlusterFS. The hardware running my GFS cluster is older and I decided it was better to replace it than continue maintaining it.

Background Information

Back in 2003 I needed to find a storage solution that was fast, reliable, and fault-tolerant. It also needed to be accessed by multiple clients simultaneously. After doing much research, I ended up going with an IBM FAStT 600 2GB Fibre Channel (FC) based storage system. The intent was to replace a single server running a JBOD SCSI disk chassis and RAID-5 card acting as an NFS server.

LUKS Encrypted Disks under Ubuntu 10.10

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 22:21:30 +0100

This posting is mostly just a reference for myself since I don’t do this often enough for me to have it memorized. These are the steps I use to create LUKS encrypted disks to use as a backup target that I can take off-site. Since they’re off site and stored in my desk where others may have access to the disks, I want to make sure that I’m the only one with access to the data. I use bare OEM style hard drives in a Thermaltake BlacX hard drive docking station. I have one at home and one at the office.

Linux Soft Phone Roundup

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 01:14:20 +0100

I’ve been working heavily with VoIP for the last couple of years, and every few months I find myself looking at SIP soft phones again. I haven’t really used them at all under Linux in a long time because none of them quite fit my needs or are as good as the ones available under Windows. Because of this, and the fact that I do 99% of my work under Linux, I’ve got 8 SIP phones, 3 ATA’s and 2 regular phones sitting on my desk right now. This makes for quite a bit of clutter.

Open Source and other nuggets

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 02:51:43 +0100

The silence for the last few months has been because my life got crazy. I’ve been spending a lot of time working and what hasn’t been working has been spent in preparation for our new baby. Yes, thats right, baby. In 2006 we were told by a fertility doctor that we would likely never have kids. We didn’t figure it out until less than a week before Jessica entered the second trimester. So thats been consuming all of my weekends getting the nursery (strange calling it that) and the rest of the house ready for the new baby.

Moving to MythTV Part 2 - The Frontend

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 19:02:03 +0100

So, in the last 3 weeks I’ve done a lot with MythTV. Most notably, I’ve finished the frontend system that is connected to our TV. There was a lot of trial and error, frustration and an entire system replacement, but its now up and near perfect.

So, a week and a half ago Comcast got installed. I didn’t have any of the capture cards yet, so I did more reading and checking and it turns out the Comcast boxes include firewire ports. Despite what the installers say, they’re active on the boxes thanks to a nice FCC ruling a few years back. With active firewire ports, I wouldn’t need to get the PVR-350. I connected everything, following the guides from the MythTV wiki and went pretty smoothly. Or so I thought. I did manage to get things recording, but not reliably. In part 3, I’ll talk about my backend configuration since I’ll be doing more with that this afternoon and I’m not done with it. With the current setup, I have been managing to record HD programs and SD programs via firewire. That brought me to the shortcomings on the frontend…

Moving to MythTV Part 1

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 01:16:21 +0100

Going to preface this by stating this will be a multi-part blog post, and I have no idea how many parts there will be when I’m all finished. Oh, and like most other things I write, it will probably be really verbose. Sorry ‘bout that, its just the way I tend to write.

Remote Desktop on Xubuntu 9.10

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:31:58 +0100

So I was planning to work from home on the Friday after thanksgiving so I wanted to be able to access my work desktop from home just in case. Normally I just ssh and use terminals and such, but for some reason I decided I wanted a full desktop. I use Xubuntu at home and at the office, and there is no default VNC setup like there is with Ubuntu and Kubuntu. A couple of quick Google searches and I came across this post:

Fedora out, Xubuntu in

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:23:38 +0100

The number of minor annoyances in Fedora 11 turned into a major annoyance. Last Saturday I wiped Fedora 11 from my home machine and installed Xubntu, which is the Xfce-centric Ubuntu distribution. I did the same on my office machine on Wednesday.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with Xubuntu and Ubuntu in general. For the most part, everything just works. The Synaptic package manager made the installation of most things pretty painless. I’ve installed all of my “non-standard” apps without having to first find the right repository, then hope that there aren’t conflicts, and then fight with different versions of things because there were conflicts, etc. Everything that I use on a normal basis is in one of the repositories that Ubuntu has included. On Fedora I always had to fight with them. I didn’t realize just how many extra steps there were in Fedora until I didn’t have to do them.

Fedora 11 First Impressions

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:06:13 +0100

So this week I did something unprecedented for me. I downloaded and installed a new Fedora release the same week it was released officially. After reading a bit about how stable and quick it is for others I decided to take the plunge. I’ve now installed it on three machines (in this order):

MediaTomb revisited

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:58:56 +0100

As I mentioned before, I keep coming back to MediaTomb, playing with it for a few hours and then going back to uShare. Not this time. For the last couple of days I’ve been reading a lot more on the MediaTomb wiki, particularly the scripting pages.

I’m not sure why it wasn’t obvious to me before, but somehow I’d managed to keep overlooking those pages. Using the scripting I was able to create a hierarchy almost exactly what I wanted. I just wish there was an option to prevent the “PC Directory” from being sent to the renderers.

FUPPES Revisited

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 02:53:01 +0100

So after a bit more Googling, I took another look at FUPPES. The “release” (SVN-578) seems quite a bit more stable. The version I was working with is SVN-634, which is the latest from the author’s subversion repository. It still has the mostly the same pros and cons. The stable version doesn’t automatically watch directories, though. So the pros and cons balance out again.

UPnP Media Servers

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 03:00:04 +0100

After doing quite a bit of research on media players in 2007, I convinced Jessica to get me a D-Link DSM-520 for Christmas that year. Since then, I’ve made most of our DVD collection and all of our music “on-demand”. Well, sort of.

Things still have a long way to go in the whole “digital entertainment” arena. The focus of this post, however is the Media Servers that serve the content. Being geeks, we’ve acquired several media players in the house over the years. This includes my now aborted MP3 Box project as well as off the shelf products. We have a Netgear MP101, a MacSense HomePod and the aforementioned D-Link MediaLounge DSM-520. They each have their strengths and weaknesses.

First update of 2009

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 22:43:11 +0100

Well, the last two years have been…..Interesting.

This is just a quick update to give the site a recent post and start to get back into the whole blogging thing again. Things have been extremely hectic for the last two years. Some good things have happened, some bad, but mostly just busy. I haven’t wanted to spend much of my “off-time” behind the computer, but things are settling down a bit and I find myself wanting to post more.

Fedora 9 and KDE4 - I wanted to love them

Sat, 24 May 2008 19:57:29 +0100

I’ve been running Linux as my primary desktop since about 1996 (switching from OS/2 when IBM started dropping support for it), and running Linux servers since early 1994 (my first Slackware system was running Linux Kernel 0.99pl15). Over the years I’ve tried many of the various distributions including Slackware (which is what I started with), Caldera, Debian, SuSE, and of course RedHat. Back around RedHat Linux 3 I switched and have been using RedHat distros for my desktop almost exclusively since then. There have been a lot of frustrations with RedHat over the years, but with the Fedora Project things have gotten much better. The switch to Yum for package management and 3rd party repositories such as Livna have made things very easy to upgrade and maintain. Every 6 months I watch to see what’s new in the latest Fedora release. Typically I’m a version or two behind since I want my computer to be stable. Right now at home I’m on Fedora 7 and Fedora 8 at the office.

Frivolous Litigation

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 21:05:29 +0100

From Wikipedia on Frivolous litigation there is a great quote from Lawyer Danial B. Evans:

[W]hen a judge calls an argument “ridiculous” or “frivolous,” it is absolutely the worst thing the judge could say. It means that the person arguing the position has absolutely no idea of what he is doing, and has completely wasted everyone’s time. It doesn’t mean that the case wasn’t well argued, or that judge simply decided for the other side, it means that there was no other side. The argument was absolutely, positively, incompetent. The judge is not telling you that you were “wrong.” The judge is telling you that you are out of your mind.

Former TV Stars Arrested in Meth Lab

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:45:49 +0100

Home Improvement - Nov 4, 2007

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 02:58:24 +0100

Woot! We finished Jessica’s room to the point where we moved her computer into it. We got the floor cleaned up and the baseboards put back on yesterday:

Its somewhat disturbing to note that my wife matches her room. Pink on the top and bottom, black in between (posted with her permission, lest I be killed):

Pumpkin Carving 2007

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:28:14 +0100

So its that time of year again. The air is crisp, the days are much shorter, and the grass in the back yard is covered in leaves from the neighbor’s trees. Tonight shivering street urchins will be knocking at the door in a variety of costumes begging for candy. My candy. Not yours. Can’t have. Okay, fine, you can have one. Damn kids. And get off my lawn!

Home Improvement - Part 2

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:36:56 +0100

We got the first coat of paint on the walls on Sunday and the room immediately transformed, still no appropriate adjectives -- Jessica says that her choices for colors escape description. Of course now she wants a theme song, too. Something that speaks to her personality. The Pinky and the Brain theme song comes closest for her, I think. While I was starting in on the first wall, this is of course what she was painting:

Halloween 2006, Better Late Than Never

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 19:07:14 +0100

After Jessica saw what I had posted today, we had the following IM conversation:

[11:55:49 AM] <Truffle> there’s a gnome in the first set of pics [11:56:05 AM] <gottafixthat> LOL. Of course there is. [11:56:12 AM] <Truffle> gack! [11:56:18 AM] <gottafixthat> [11:56:20 AM] <Truffle> oh, and I’m mad at you [11:56:24 AM] <gottafixthat> Why? [11:56:33 AM] <Truffle> you never posted the second pumpkin I did [11:56:37 AM] <gottafixthat> I suck

Home Improvement - Part 1

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 18:45:35 +0100

Since we moved into our house back in early 2003, we’ve slowly but surely been redecorating rooms and fixing the place up. We’ve had a few people live with us in that time, and each time, Jessica has always sacrificed her space. The first time was her sister, who was escorted out by the Sheriff in handcuffs (thats another story though). After her sister *ahem* moved out, Jessica took over the back room to be her craft room. We redecorated my den before we did her room, and the room that was to be hers became a sort of holding room for stuff we didn’t have a place for yet. This is what it looked shortly after her sister moved out and before Jessica moved in the first time (ignore all the stuff, it has all since found a place to be put away):

Gothic 3 - First Impressions

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 20:11:19 +0100

After a very long wait, Aspyre has finally released Pirahna Bytes’ Gothic 3 in the states. Jessica and I picked it up last Saturday and have been playing it every evening since then. I would say we’re about 20% of the way through the game at this point, so I thought I would post my first impressions on it.

Halloween 2006

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 02:11:35 +0100

Its that time of year again! No, not that time, its Halloween! That of course means pumpkin carving. After last year’s marathon session on October 30th, we decided to get an earlier start this year. Got them on last weekend’s shopping trip and planned our Sunday around carving the unsuspecting cucurbita pepos. We must be getting better at it. We started at about 5:30pm and were both finished by 8:00pm. We even took a couple of breaks.

Still in a time warp

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 17:05:22 +0100

That last post about Gothic II, model trains and Al Lowe’s new game I started back in May. It took me almost 5 months to get back to it. Talk about being in a long term time warp.

There have been a lot of things happening at my company, most of which I can’t talk about publicly because of trade secrets and such, but suffice to say I’ve been working even more than I normally did since early this summer. By the time I get home from work each day, I don’t really feel like spending too much time on the computer at home, so not a lot of posts here. Its good though, there are many exciting projects that I’m working on right now and with good people. The office has gone from three of us to ten of us since July. We’ve brought in racks of new servers for these projects and will be launching new services hopefully in November. Once we launch some of them, I’ll be able to talk a bit more about them.

Gaming time warp

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 16:45:31 +0100

Talk about out of character for me. A few weeks ago at E3, Al Lowe, one of the greatest video game makers of all time announced that he has created a new company called iBase Entertainment and was creating a new game called Sam Suede in Undercover Exposure. I’ve been a big fan of Al’s since the Leisure Suit Larry 1 days that I played with stunning 16-Color EGA graphics back in the late 80’s. I met Al about a year ago and had him autograph my copy of the Larry I, II, & II collection. Of course the good picture of Al and I shaking hands was lost, so this one will have to do. Hopefully Al won’t mind me putting this picture up. We met because I knew he was an avid model railroad hobbyist. I’d been carting around the model trains I got for Christmas from Uncle David when I was 5 or 6, and I thought Al would like them or be able to use them. I believe Al gave them to a children’s hospital, which is great.

And there was much rejoycing. Yay!

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 21:20:27 +0100

Study Shows Coffee OK For HeartFrom the article: “Coffee lovers can drink up without fear of increasing their risk of heart disease, according to a major new study that found people could consume as many as six cups a day without upping their risk.”

This is excellent! So now I just need to get it down to six cups a day…

MP3 Box Issues

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 21:49:09 +0100

Well, a few days ago Jessica started having problems with it. The box started locking up. Took a bit of effort to get it back online again (since its headless), three or four reboots before everything came back in. Not happy.

My first guess is that it is heat related. The only fan in the unit is the CPU fan. The inside of the case is quite warm. I haven’t put a thermometer into it yet, so I can’t say exactly how warm. It first locked up when she was using it “locally” with MPD playing. This does require a bit more CPU power than streaming which is what she has been doing mostly since I gave it to her. In fact, it GMediaServer had been streaming to the HomePod for just about 12 hours a day for the prior two weeks. Simple disk reads and sending packets over the network, very little CPU power. This all started happening on the 22nd or 23rd.

MP3 Box v0.1

Sun, 18 Dec 2005 22:27:22 +0100

Its been a busy few weeks since my last posting. I spent a couple Sundays working on the web interface and the streaming interface. It still needs quite a bit of work, but it is very usable now. I “released” it for Jessica to use about a week and a half ago.

MP3 Player base distribution update

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 19:00:35 +0100

So, I’ve been working on the MP3 player project quite a bit over the last few weeks. Christmas is a month away, so with the limited time I’ve got to work on it, I’d rather do that than post.

The remote control that comes with the Allwell box doesn’t work. Well, it does, but they tried to be clever and map it to the PS/2 mouse/keyboard port. It would probably work fine if their documentation matched and if they didn’t use the null character for the play button. Thats very difficult to match since many devices and programs use 0 to terminate arrays and strings and such.

Happy Halloween!

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 04:03:38 +0100

So, yesterday afternoon Jessica and I went out to get pumpkins to carve. Its become a bit of a tradition for us over the last several years that we both really enjoy. Since we went out on the day before Halloween, pickings were a bit slim, but we managed to find a couple good ones.

MP3 Player Update

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 02:16:42 +0100

Quick update on the MP3 player project. I spent several hours yesterday looking at cases, embedded systems, and got really, really frustrated. The Home Theater PC (HTPC) is just now starting to catch on, but the manufacturers are charging way too much for a case. Granted, these are some really nice looking cases, but the prices they want for some MP3 of them took them right out of the running.

Simple Set Top MP3 Player

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 02:53:30 +0100

For a couple years now, Jessica has wanted a simple, standalone MP3 player that she could put on her desk or on a shelf, or entertainment cabinet or someplace else thats out of the way. Thats all it needs to do is play MP3’s, have a simple LCD or VFD display on it to show what song is playing and have a web or other interface to make and save playlists. Oh, and it needs to have a hard drive in it to store all this stuff. Software MP3 players for Windows try to do too much and be too flashy. Plus she wants to be able to stream or otherwise listen to music in other rooms of the house. So this means a full fledged computer is out of the question. Too much power, too loud, too expensive just for this purpose.

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