Blog Posts

I occasionally write blog posts where I talk about software, hardware, or even plants that I'm working on.

Recent Posts

Adopting NixOS for my RKE1 Kubernetes nodes

For those not aware, Nix is an interesting new application (Nix) and operating System (NixOS) that provides a declarative environment definition and atomic operating system. Declarative means that instead of running apt-get install docker, you write down everything you want and it installs everything and removes everything you don’t want. You can use the same language to manage packages, users, firewall, networking, etc. This is useful because now you can revision control your OS state in Git and have exact replicas across multiple hosts.

My financial data scraping system

In my Importing and cleaning my Mint transactions, I worked through loading, cleaning, and solving for transfers. However, Mint and other financial scraping tools are not authoritative and don’t expose everything that the bank itself will provide. For example, Mint and Monarch don’t have detailed enough stock transaction and position data to identify cost basis, tax lots, and positions. Directly going to the bank can give me higher precision time stamps, scans of checks, merchant addresses, and other attributes.

Securing data using Vault in a Home Lab

I have several projects running in my Home Lab that now have to store and use sensitive secrets. In my Self-hosted finances series, I developed software to scrape my own bank statements (more on that coming soon.) In other projects, I store API keys to manage DNS or even my dedicated servers. These applications all run in Kubernetes, which does support Secrets, however, by default, they are not encrypted and are easily accessible to actors that have access to the K8s API.

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