My name is Carter and I’m a 3rd year computer science student from Oregon State University. I’ve worked for 3 years at OSU as an informational technology technician and web developer, have published and contributed to a decent amount of open source software, and have only had one small internship in high school as a...
8/5/2024: Updated to add details from Nest Hub (2nd gen) testing. Introduction I’ve been using smart home devices for many years now as an early adopter of the Amazon Echo and Google Home. I was immediately impressed with the capabilities of Google Assistant, but over the years I have become more dissatisfied with Google as...
I’ve written before about how I use Cloudflare Access to provide zero trust access and MFA to my homelab without the need for running local VPN infrastructure, and while that has worked great, there was one app I could never get to work reliably behind Cloudflare: Nextcloud. The issue with Nextcloud came down to issues...
First things first, I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself a “Vue Developer”. I have a few years of experience working in Vue, but I’m by no means a professional. I started learning Vue in 2020, but only really started building projects with it in late 2021. Since then it’s been my primary framework, and over the...
Background As an IT technician, one problem my team and I have faced is trying to track down a specific piece of equipment in one of our many server and network rooms. As a university IT team consisting of mostly students, we have a lot of new and inexperienced technicians not familiar with our server...
I’ve been a user of Zoho Mail for 8+ years and have been very happy with the product. It is one of, if not the only service offering completely free email hosting, with 5 users on 5GB mailboxes completely for free. Before Zoho I tried running my own mail servers but eventually gave up and...
Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a new project, rack manage, a datacenter rack organization tool. As a tool built primarily for enterprise customers, one must-have feature on my list was Single Sign-On support. I decided to use Firebase as my app development platform, mostly because I didn’t want to develop my...
I’m currently working on a new project, rack manage, which runs in a combination of Cloudflare and Google serverless environments. I decided to use Firebase for the cost and flexibility, thinking that the app wouldn’t need much besides a database connection, but as I’ve continued development, I’ve started leaning more and more on Google Cloud...
UPDATE: As of December 11, 2022, Home Assistant no longer officially supports Ubuntu, and requires Debian instead. Instructions below have been updated to bypass the OS check and recommend Debian instead. My apartment is filled with smart home tech, from a smart air conditioner to smart lights and smart security cameras. One issue I had...
Working on a portfolio or similar project where you want icons to display what tech stack you’re using? TechFont is here to help. I usually turn to Font Awesome for any project in need of icons, but they don’t have brand icons for everything, and the ones they do have don’t support multi-color. To my...