We need to talk about the state of modern software. Yes, those pieces of .exe, .dmg or .deb binaries that come with almost every device and service out there (or maybe they even come with or for your phone). I’ve been contemplating writing this for some time, but recent events around the absolute ridiculousness of the scope of the mess we have on our collective hands, coupled with a Twitter thread from 2019 making the rounds prompted me to actually get this all out of my mind and into a blog post.

I've had a Stream Deck for a while. It's basically keyboard shortcuts, mapped to an individual button, with a visual set up for that button. It's convenient, it's easy to use, and it looks really good on the desk among the multitude of other RGB lights that are embedded in modern computing technology.

For some time, I needed a way to use caffeinate on Windows. If you are coming from macOS, you know how useful this utility can be when you want to keep the computer awake for some definite or indefinite time. So, following the engineer mindset, I decided to build my own, starting with a PowerShell script.

If you are a podcast owner, one of the things that can be a bit annoying is the multitude of different data points that are available for the show. Now, this is not the fact that there is too much data but rather that this data is scattered across different providers, with different systems, and different ways to manage it.

As I was getting ready to register myself, I quickly learned that all of the appointments that were available near me were all the way in June, which is still some time out. Not terribly bad, but I was wondering if I can get my first shot sooner. I've heard about folks who were cancelling their existing appointments and therefore making their previous time slots available, but I had no visibility into the process on the vaccination registration site.

I encountered a very unique challenge today - I needed to cut a part of a video hosted online with Azure Media Services for reference. The video in question is Into Focus, the 'show within a show,' that aired at Microsoft's Ignite conference earlier this week.

You might have many reason to do speech-to-text (STT) transformations locally - privacy, you have custom-trained models, or maybe you just don’t need the latency that comes with online services. I have a podcast, that I want to transcribe and generate captions for, and I wanted to do that blazingly fast. One of the choices for STT might be DeepSpeech - a library developed by Mozilla that does just that. More than that, it comes with a pre-trained English speech model that you can start using right away.

2021 turns out to be a good year for folks like myself, that love collecting their own personal metrics. Earlier, I chatted about collecting air quality data, Twitter data - and now, GitHub contribution data. In this post I will describe a simple approach to grabbing your own GitHub contribution statistics without having to jump through too many hoops.

Right before the end of the year, I wrote about my updated approach to recording Nest video streams without having to worry about the Nest Aware subscription by reading from the video stream directly with the help of a .NET-based application I wrote, called FoggyCam.

I've used my Synology NAS for some time now - about two years and counting, and it's been a great tool to backup information locally (e.g. from my phones or shared computers). Then, I got to thinking - it's pretty much a mini-computer. It has a quad-core 1.4Ghz CPU, a whopping 2GB RAM, and _plenty_ of storage. I can do more with it than just use it for occasional data dumps. That is - I could use it for frequent data dumps.