Self Hosting is awesome - Komga for comics

2025-01-12 Dave

In my last post about my newly acquired synology server, I talked about how happy I was with the system I had bought and the plethora of options that can be installed via the Synology package manager. Yeah forget all that, Docker is where it’s at. I was trying to find a way to see about reading the various books and comics I’ve gotten from Humble Bundle over the years on my phone without having to log into the actual NAS, navigate the filesystem and download the item to my device. Continue reading

Staring my Home Lab

2024-05-17 Dave

For a while now I’ve been looking to get a proper home NAS (Network Attached Storage) device to bolster the home office. I know all too well the pain of losing data to corrupted hard drives, lost USB keys or, in one case, an IDE drive in a world of SATA connections (which is another story to investigate). To try and prevent further losses of data, I’ve been looking to adopt the 3-2-1 philosophy of data backups. Continue reading

Don't Use Hyphens in Environmental Variables

2023-04-26 Dave

tl;dr: As the title says, don’t use hyphens in environment variables, use underscores instead. A large part of my job is working on CI pipelines and the automation of the build and deployment of software. This means that I spend a lot of time working with environment variables and the configuration of the tools that I use. Over the last 24 hours, I’ve spent about 6 of them trying to find out why a bash script I was working on was failing to reconcile the value of a variable. Continue reading

LaTeX is amazing

2021-03-05 Dave

I hate formatting documents. Actually, I hate REFORMATTING documents. When I had to tackle my CV after my first job, I got the feedback that my CV needed to be updated to make it easier to read and more succinct. Ever since then, whenever the CV needed to be updated, I would end up having to copy the text out and find a new format or template to copy the data in. Continue reading

Configuration Management Tool Comparison

2021-02-25 Dave

As part of my masters, I did my thesis on comparing a collection of the most common configuration management tools on the market for speed of execution, cost and ease of implementation. What I’ve detailed below is a summary of the findings I made, and if you’re interested in the learning more about the test framework, conditions and low level detail, please feel free to download the full thesis here. Continue reading

Ps4 Camera as Webcam

2021-02-18 Dave

I was recently asked to go to an online video chat and I wanted to do it on my main desktop for a few reasons but I don’t have a webcam for this machine. After a bit of brainstorming however, I remembered that I do have a camera for my PS4 and when Sony announced the support for PS5, they allowed people to claim an adaptor for the camera to make it USB 3. Continue reading

Test Automation Tech Test

2021-02-03 Dave

I’ve been involved with interviewing candidates for tech roles for years at this point and have interviewed college graduates up to senior management, in Ireland and outside, virtually and face to face. I generally really enjoy meeting people and have refined the interview techniques I have to try and ensure candidates are as comfortable as possible but one thing I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking is gauging technical ability. I’ve delivered paper based tests, multiple choice code questions and whiteboard activities and with all of these, the common factor is just how abstract the tasks are and how unrelated they are to typical day to day activities. Continue reading

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