boulder dan

A DIY version of what the rich have: a team of specialists coordinating your money, running on my home server. What is in it, what it caught, and why the posture matters more than the tooling.

One of the untold stories of the AI revolution is how fun it is to build stuff again. A note on homelabs, work agents, and feeling technical again after a decade in management.

Nine months of going all-in on AI-assisted development at StackHawk: the ramp-up, the custom tooling, and what actually made it stick.

Over the past couple days, I’ve been on a mission to clean up my music library in forScore, the sheet music reader I use on my iPad. What started as a simple organization project turned into building custom tooling and developing ideas for how forScore could better support power users and integrations. The real power tool here was Claude Code—Anthropic’s AI coding assistant. It handled the fuzzy matching logic to identify duplicates and normalize inconsistent names, helped build the Rust CLI from scratch, and iterated through the tricky parts like reverse-engineering forScore’s binary plist format. Tasks that would have taken me days of trial and error were done in hours. ...

This year our trees have grown large enough and my Christmas lights were old enough that multiple strands died, so we made a significant investment in new lights. At Home Depot I found $5, $10, and $20 options. Since my last lights lasted about 10 years, I’m curious whether I’ll see a difference in longevity between the $10 and $20 lights. I skipped the $5 ones—they looked disposable with no replaceable bulbs. ...

When people discuss thread safety in code it is almost entirely within the context of threading in a single process. The problems that come up are races conditions, data races, and unseen updates with solutions like locking, synchronized updates and immutability. This definition of thread safety is too focused. Much of the problems normally attributed to thread safety can be seen in programs that have no access to OS threads or are running on multiple servers. ...

I just spent a day without being able to send email because I enabled two factor authentication on my work account. That and a complicated gmail setup that apparently appeals to no one else ;) I forward all my mail from my work, google apps account into my personal gmail account so that all my email is consolidated for reading, filtering, etc. I then use the “Send mail as” functionality to email from my work account. Gmail even allows you to configure alternate SMTP information so that when I send from my work account people don’t get a “Sent on behalf of…” in their Outlook. ...

I was getting errors(unable to find valid certification path to requested target) in Alfresco trying to connect to LDAP over ssl using an untrusted certificate and found a great hint on the interwebs that I thought I’d share. Most of the hits on google mention this post: http://blogs.sun.com/gc/entry/unable_to_find_valid_certification My only criticism of that article is that it only minimally addresses how to actually use the fixed keystore. I downloaded their source and hacked it up a little change the name of the certificate store from “jssecacerts” into “cacert” which is the default certificate store for all java programs. My goal was to fix the certificate store for the entire machine. ...

I sent this as an email to kindle-feedback but thought I would share it with the interwebs as well. Let me be clear that I am absolutely in love with my Kindle. I used to not particularly enjoy reading but the kindle has changed my opinion in two short weeks. With that said my major sadness about it was access to personal content. Hence this letter: Dear Amazon, Please improve the reading ecosystem represented by the kindle device, and the plethora of applications that also represent “kindle devices” e.g. the iphone, ipad, web, etc. Right now these other devices are treated like second class citizens because there is no way to get personal content onto them and to synchronize the reading of the content. ...

I was fortunate enough to receive a CR-48 from Google last week. My impressions of it are more or less in line with what MG Siegler over at TechCrunch has reported: good battery, nice screen, light weight laptop. The only problem is that I have needed to adjust my workflow when I’m working on my regular computer, a Macbook Pro to facilitate sharing documents between the two machines. For example, I have migrated away from OmniOutliner to a comparable online version, Workflowy. ...