Thoughts on tech

186 posts latest post 2026-10-06
Publishing rhythm
May 2026 | 3 posts

It’s easy to configure push notifications through Gotify from Grafana by setting up a generic Webhook Alerting Contact Point…

The parameters are:

  • HTTP Method: POST
  • URL: http:///message
  • Authentication is done with an app token generated from Gotify, and you put it in Authorization Header: Credentials in the Grafana configuration

See image

sudo apt-get install -y samba \ then set sharesmb=on \ chown the user \ smbpasswd -a \ then mount with user/password from other machine

The Importance of Nostr According to ChatGPT

Disclaimer # This was written by ChatGPT with zero oversight from me. There are a few things that are not 100% accurate, but the main idea is there… I am hoping to actually write about my experience with nostr as I get more involved on the platform. The Power of the Decentralized Social Media Platform Nostr: A Guide for Beginners # Social media has become a cornerstone of modern communication, allowing individuals to connect across borders and share ideas instantly. However, traditional platforms have raised concerns about censorship, data privacy, and the monopolistic control of user-generated content. Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays), a decentralized social media protocol, offers a revolutionary alternative by emphasizing freedom, privacy, and user autonomy. This essay explores the transformative power of Nostr, why it matters, and provides a practical guide for beginners to get started. The Power of Decentralization: Why Nostr Matters # At its core, Nostr is a dec…

I was debugging some ArgoCD stuff earlier today and I love using k9s to explore my k8s resources.

The TLDR is that I put some bad env vars in the global values for my ArgoCD pods, this caused the webUI to hang. An easy way to push things through is to open k9s, view the Deployments, and edit the env vars there so the pods can be in the right state to restart and pickup the changes (you’ve obviously fixed the values file already right?)

Well the Notification Controller was the pod hanging, and I couldn’t find it in the Deployments view! This blew my mind… until I realized that it was a Stateful Set.

So, this is not a comparison of the 2 - this is just a note to say that all I had to do was find the StatefulSets in k9s and do the same workflow for editing what I needed to edit to get the pods into workable state while working on the values file…

docker contexts are great, would recommend putting them in your prompt though (via starship or something else)… here’s why

I like to manage my containers remotely - I have a nice development setup on my desktop and I try to keep my server as bare-bones as possible. For a while I’ve been using ansible which makes it easy to manage configuration etc on other machines. But I recently learned about docker contexts and I’m planning to scale down my homelab management to just docker-compose stacks rather than a bunch of super complicated ansible playbooks

So, setting up a context is easy - it’s basically an ssh connection to another machine!

docker context create koober --docker "host=ssh://nic@koober"

koober is one of my dev machines and my ~/.ssh/config is setup such that I can ssh nic@koober, this makes the context work really seamlessly.

So there’s the default context (the machine you’re on) and now I have koober

To use it you run docker context use koober

And then to check we can ls the contexts

docker context ls
NAME       DESCRIPTION                               DOCKER ENDPOINT               ERROR
default    Current DOCKER_HOST based configuration   unix:///var/run/docker.sock   
koober *                                             ssh://nic@koober

Notice the * - that indicates that’s our current context.

Trouble #

Now here’s where things get hairy… you’ve gotta be super-aware of what context you’re using. I have an indicator in my starship prompt that shows the current context, but since I’m new to using them I kind of didn’t notice it until I ran into this issue…

I’m working on a python application in docker but was not able to execute the entrypoint even though I KNEW the file was there… let’s take a look

Example #

Here’s a minimal hello world applycation in docker to illustrate the issue

# main.py
print("hello world")
# Use an official Python runtime as a parent image
FROM python:3.11-slim

# Set the working directory in the container
WORKDIR /app

# Copy the current directory contents into the container at /app
COPY . /app

# Run the main.py script as the container's main process
CMD ["python", "main.py"]
services:
  hello-world:
    build: .
    volumes:
      - .:/app

Notice volume mounting in my project directory . to /app as a common practice to develop inside the container

Here’s where I started to question my sanity…

✗ docker compose up                                            
[+] Running 1/0
 ✔ Container docker-context-example-hello-world-1  Created                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              0.0s 
Attaching to hello-world-1
hello-world-1  | python: can't open file '/app/main.py': [Errno 2] No such file or directory
hello-world-1 exited with code 2

python can't open file? hmm… Let’s take a look at the image

First let’s make sure we get the image name right

✗ docker container ls -a              
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                                           COMMAND                  CREATED          STATUS                       PORTS                                                                                  NAMES
3d7285fc39e2   docker-context-example-hello-world              "python main.py"         10 minutes ago   Exited (2) 44 seconds ago                                                                                           docker-context-example-hello-world-1

Now we can docker run --rm -it --entrypoint /bin/bash --name debug docker-context-example-hello-world

❯ docker run --rm -it --entrypoint /bin/bash --name debug docker-context-example-hello-world  
root@ee46d0e22de8:/app# python main.py
Hello, World!
root@ee46d0e22de8:/app# 

WHAT THE HECK??

What happened… #

What happened turns out to be pretty simple once we realize I’m using contexts…

koboer is a remote context, the docker run and docker compose up commands are interacting with the docker socket on that machine.

So if I compose up the stack notice that there’s a volume bind mount in there - well those do not work with contexts (or at least I’m not aware of hose to make it work) and so the /app directory was getting blown away essentially with an empty overlay…

But when running with just docker run with no volume mount, the code was copied in during the build and is right where we expect it…

Let’s prove it #

❯ docker run --rm -it --entrypoint /bin/bash --name debug -v .:/app docker-context-example-hello-world
root@903f591c0384:/app# python main.py
python: can't open file '/app/main.py': [Errno 2] No such file or directory
root@903f591c0384:/app# 
Adding a `-v .:/app` to match the compose file, we get the same error...

If we switch to the default context we are back up and running as expected

✗ docker context use default
default
Current context is now "default"

nic in /tmp/docker-context-example  via   v3.13.0  (dev) 󰒄 󱔎 NO PYTHON ENVIORNMENT SET 
❯ docker compose up         
[+] Running 1/0
 ✔ Container docker-context-example-hello-world-1  Created                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              0.0s 
Attaching to hello-world-1
hello-world-1  | Hello, World!
hello-world-1 exited with code 0

nic in /tmp/docker-context-example  via   v3.13.0  (dev) 󰒄 󱔎 NO PYTHON ENVIORNMENT SET 
❯ docker run --rm -it --entrypoint /bin/bash --name debug -v .:/app docker-context-example-hello-world
root@4045b6aa8883:/app# python main.py
Hello, World!
root@4045b6aa8883:/app# 

Successful runs on both accounts with the volume mount

TLDR #

Context is king

I’m building a few FastAPI apps to throw in docker and run on my homelab… I wanted to add healthchecks and here’s a simple way to do it

Make sure to install curl in the dockerfile (near the top for effeciency)

# Install curl with minimal dependencies
RUN apt-get update && \
    apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends curl && \
    apt-get clean && \
    rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

Then I recommend making compose files even for single image deployments

services:
  app:
    build: .
    volumes:
      - type: bind
        source: .
        target: /app
    environment:
      - PYTHONPATH=/app
      - DOCKER_ENV=true
      - UV_VIRTUALENV=/opt/app-env
    user: "1000:1000"
    restart: unless-stopped
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://localhost:8000/health"]
      interval: 30s
      timeout: 10s
      retries: 3
      start_period: 10s

Then finally you’ll need a /health endpoint


@app.get("/health", response_class=HTMLResponse)
async def health_check():
    """
    A health check endpoint that returns a status message.
    """
    return "<html><body><h1>Service is healthy</h1></body></html>"

statically.io offers a CDN that I’m going to try to lean into for images in my blog. My hope is that the builds get and stay fast, and that page loads are fast too.

Example:


<img src="https://cdn.statically.io/gh/pypeaday/images.pype.dev/main/blog-media/skimpy-zsh.png" alt="Skimpy ZSH" title="A fancy data summary in the shell" />
Skimpy ZSH

Htop #

I recently have been having significant home server issues, and that’s not the point of this - today I learned what D state is when looking at htop.

htop-d

Apparently this means “uninterruptable sleep” and it’s a dev’s nightmare…

Context #

The issue I was having was that some zfs rollback commands were hung - for hours… I wasn’t sure what was going on, rollbacks should be instant but I figured it was just an artifact of these issues.

Turns out I still don’t know what locked the disks up but I learned why <C>-c did nothing… the more you know

the Logos web app is DISGUSTINGY bright/white - enough to actually ruin your morning…

Thankfully there’s an extension called stylus and some kind folks in the Logos community created a nice dark theme here. You simply install the extension, then go to the userstyles link <– and click install. It only changes themes for the sites configured - in this case app.logos.com

TODO: image