Hey, I’m Cody! 👋

Holy cow, how has this not come across my radar until now? I just found out about Sonic Visualiser, an open source, free audio analysis workbench and plugin suite with superpowers. A friend hit me up asking about free audio analysis tools, and I was about to let him down the hard way, saying “buddy, you really need to spend the dollarydoos on iZotope RX” when he asked what I thought about Sonic Visualiser. I hadn’t heard of it before, so I grabbed a copy of it and poked around for a few minutes. I’m astounded at what this, and the other tools in its suite can do. I want to put it through its paces more thoroughly, but holy moly does this look like a great tool. Thank you to the Center for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London for creating and maintaining this fantastic set of tools. I can’t wait to dig in further.

I recently came across a magical little project called buttervolume, a Docker Volume plugin that manages your Docker (and potentially Podman) Volumes as BTRFS subvolumes. It solves a problem I’ve had with OCI container hosted workloads for years - enabling migration of centralized storage volumes between discrete systems. VM orchestrators handle volume migration better… …or I gues more accurately, they can actually do it. I’ve been hosting services for almost my entire career. I cut my teeth on Linux and web server hosting at a local ISP and hosting provider just out of high school. And yet, I still remember the magic that I experienced when I had my first VMWare vSphere deployment. Not only was it possible to easily host multiple servers on the same system, it was possible to move those virtual servers between hosts. Gone were the days when hardware maintenance was tied to extended down times. Server migration between hosts was a quick and easy process. And it was good. ...

I love watching tabletop RPG live play shows. I got hooked on Critical Role early on, and have more recently been sucked into Dimension 20. I used to play a fair bit of Dungeons and Dragons when I was younger, and as I’ve gotten older, the desire to play mated with the difficulty of finding a solid group to play with has made these shows a fun compromise. Recently though, I’ve been noticing some traits of the dungeon masters for these tables, Matt Mercer and Brennan Lee Mulligan, that line up with strong traits for leaders of people, and I wanted to talk a little bit about it. ...

I recently came back to using IRC regularly after my friend and colleague Jochen Liilch migrated his Monospace Mentor community chat from Discord to IRC. It’s been a treat to go back to a simpler chat system paired with modern creature comforts with IRC clients like Halloy after Discord’s flirtations with the collection of IDs of its users. However, a bit of joy that I didn’t expect to rekindle was in Halloy’s customization options, specifically around the ability to play sounds for certain events (like direct messages and mentions). ...

I recently set up Bichon, a really neat mail archiving app from the creator of RustMailer. Bichon was everything I was looking for in a mail archiver - web based access without the cruft of a webmail client, with the added benefit of being able to regularly ingest email from IMAP accounts. Not only could I store and search through my email archive, I could easily maintain that archive in real time, giving me peace of mind that my email archive would no longer be in the hands of a third party provider. What follows is the saga of how I failed in setting up my own archive, recovered from that mistake, and now have a very solid workflow going forward. If you’re interested in my Bichon setup, including how I wired it up to my new provider, Proton Mail, please look forward to a quick writeup with examples on my new Codeberg repo for personal cloud / self-hosted infrastructure. ...

One of the communities I hang out at is The Server Room, a small but growing group of DevOps and adjacent professionals hosted by Jochen Lilich, aka “The Monospace Mentor”. We’ve been slowly incorporating IRC into The Server Room’s live comms structure and having a blast with it. When Jochen spearheaded the idea a while back, I found a new IRC client that I have come to enjoy quite a bit, Halloy. Obligatory “written in Rust”, but also I enjoy it’s old school vibes with modern creature comforts. What I missed with IRC though was the biggest creature comfort that modern chat apps like Slack and Discord originally hung their hat on - chat history. ...

On Friday, a buddy of mine reached out to me on Discord - “hey, uh, do you happen to know how to recover data from a dead NVMe drive?” Well, no, I didn’t at the time, but challenge accepted? I figured that I could at least figure out just how bad off the drive was. I steeled both my friend and myself for the event in which we wouldn’t be able to recover anything, and we got to work. ...

I recently completed the refresh of my personal projects logo! This is more of a personal change than anything I expect others to get excited about, but I wanted to share it with folks, as well as talk about the journey of self discovery that was required in order to make it happen. When I started my music production journey back in 2013, like all the cool music producer folks I hung out with, I needed a logo. I’ve used the moniker “belthesar”, an accidental misspelling of one of the Biblical Magi (of which these wise men were borrowed heavily in JRPGs in the 90’s and 2000’s) since my teens, so it only made sense to continue using such a self-referential name for this project. Young me, with a passing adeptness in digital image editing software, had created several “logos” in the past, but the biggest reason to make that had always been “because it looks cool”, not because I really understood the value or purpose of having a logo. This time, there was a purpose, and a story to tell, and even though I didn’t actually think in those terms when designing it, I would later discover that I following the time honored philosophy of logo design. ...

I was perusing selfh.st looking for something different, and stumbled across Cert Warden. It’s a centralized ACME certificate manager, which seems pretty neat. While I’ve leveraged Traefik’s ACME support in the past, I’ve had to turn to other solutions for creating certificates for services I don’t proxy through Traefik. In addition, it can make managing certs across ACME providers a bit easier, and at first glance it seems to have a much nicer API, allowing me to delegate specific credentials for consumers to pull things. I doubt this will be of much use for any web apps I’m hosting in my infrastructure, but I can see it being valuable middleware for cutting certs for appliances that don’t have ACME support built in. I might give it a shot soonish.

I just set up Conduit, a Matrix homeserver, for use in the household to replace our reliance on Discord, and so far it’s been pretty neat! My wife has been wanting to not depend on having Discord open all the time, which is difficult, because we both are usually at our desks all day and want to stay in touch, but dislike the idea of always needing to have that chat program up and running. In addition, we both would like to have a more convenient way to share links and files with eachother, and sometimes the kind of data we want to share is personal, which should make anyone a little wary of using a third party service for that. ...