For a while now, I have been wanting to see the options I have today to convert speech to text at the command line. Lots of commercial options exist today for doing that, but I also wanted to check out open source options.
In this experiment, I decided to compare:
I wanted to quickly jot down some of the PDF tasks that the wonderful qpdf has been helping me do. This ranges from merging multiple PDF files to storing decrypted versions of annoying PDFs sent by some banks.
I used to use pdftk till some time back, but it had a lot of dependencies which were a pain to install. I exclusively use qpdf now instead.
As part of my journey in learning Kubernetes this year, I ventured today in pushing my first tiny helm chart to Artifacthub.
I had been using custom made charts for a couple of months now, but mostly in the CI/CD environment of my company. Packaging a chart for public consumption needed me to learn a few more things.
When using Ansible for my home lab, an initial problem was about how to keep sudo passwords for my various machines in an practical manner (I really don’t like the idea of password-less sudo even in my homelab).
The remote users used for my ansible logins to each of my machines are different, and can be managed via the inventory file. But the sudo passwords for them are not the same, and it is pretty annoying to enter them while running ansible on the command line.
I decided to find a way to make this a little less annoying.
From time to time, I have felt the need to install a specific version of a Homebrew formula. Like the other day, I was investigating whether a particular problem I was facing with Podman was because of a version bump from 2.x to 3.x.
At some point in the past, a way around it was to find the formula file at a particular commit of the Homebrew tap, and
directly install it via brew install $URL.
That is no longer supported, for good reason. But the tip provided is pretty terse.
I thought I will just jot down the steps I took to do this the recommended way.
So the tech world went a little crazy today, as usual ignoring more consequential problems happening in the world. Docker posted a notice saying that its Mac and Windows desktop clients will no longer be free for anybody other than individuals and small companies.
Here is The Register:
Docker will restrict use of the free version of its Docker Desktop utility to individuals or small businesses, and has introduced a new more expensive subscription, as it searches for a sustainable business model.
The company has renamed its Free plan to “Personal” and now requires that businesses with 250 or more employees, or higher than $10m in annual revenue, must use a paid subscription if they require Docker Desktop.
This gave me an excuse to try out something which I had been meaning to do for a while - use Podman as a replacement for Docker desktop on my Mac.
For most simple to moderately complex web servers in Golang, I have always preferred to use the standard net/http library, laboring through the parsing of RequestPaths and query parameters when necessary.
But when the boilerplate code for request parsing starts obscuring the business logic, I tend to look out at other libraries. I however have always hesitated using too heavy a framework to keep dependencies simple.
For HTTP routing, for example, I have found httprouter to satisfy most of the gaps in the standard library that I have frequently faced, and at the same time the library is totally dep free!
Here are some really quick notes about using the library, mostly for my own reference. 😄
MySQL 5.6 onwards introduced GTID based replication drastically simplifying replication setup and increasing reliability. New MySQL cluster 5.6+ setups are already done with GTID enabled by default.
But if you are one of those people who migrated from a pre-5.6 MySQL version, you probably avoided enabling GTID to make the upgrade easier. In such a situation, typically, you would upgrade the slaves to the new MySQL version, and then failover the master to an upgraded slave. This would let you do an online upgrade of a MySQL cluster from a pre-5.6 to a 5.6+ installation, but you will not be able to do this with GTID enabled.
I recently had a requirement to move a bunch of such MySQL 5.7 clusters using the old binlog position based replication to a GTID based replication setup.
Now there is a pretty good official document about how to do this manually, which you should definitely read up before doing this. But it is a pain to do this manually on a bunch of servers.
I captured all the steps mentioned in the document into an Ansible playbook to automate the whole process. It also includes a procedure missing in the official document, to actually flip the ongoing replication to GTID protocol.
The playbook source is here with step by step documentation here.
I have a couple of systems at home which provide web services, like my Intel NUC and my Synology NAS, and I have been wanting for a while to move all of them to a proper https only environment.
But my biggest hurdle for doing that, has been the enormous pain in managing certificates in a way that makes everybody - the servers, the browsers, the local http clients happy. From my previous attempts, there was always the browsers which annoyed me to no end, and I ended up getting by using improperly made self-signed certificates and accepting all the invalid certificate warnings that my browser threw up.
So this Friday night, I spent my late night hours trying to get at the bottom of it all, and several frustrating hours later, finally made everybody happy.