Blog

  • NFL Retro Bowl 25

    I grew up watching football, was lucky enough to see a couple of Super Bowl wins for my home Steelers before moving away from the area, and then promptly losing interest since there were no streaming options at the time (and NFL Sunday Ticket was absurdly expensive, just like it still is today.) Now living…


  • Removing Nodes From Open Source Puppet

    At work we leverage Puppet for management of our infrastructure. While tools like Ansible seem to get a lot more love in the industry due to things like being based on Python (Puppet is Ruby-based) and using YAML for its definitions (Puppet has its own DSL, or Domain Specific Language), it works extremely well for…


  • 2024 Cincinnati Bengals Sideline Hats

    The start of another NFL season is officially upon us. After scooping up tickets for a December game against my hometown Steelers at the very moment they released to sitting 2 rows back from the field for my first ever preseason game, I’m excited to see what the Bengals can do this year. There are…


  • Why YouTube Is Better Than Udemy: Or How To Not Get Stuck In Tutorial Hell

    Anyone who works in tech knows that there’s always more stuff to learn. It’s a rapidly evolving area, and whether it’s new programming languages, new frameworks, new deployment methods, etc. new things are cropping up all the time. I work at a fairly small company, so we often need to adjust the technology we use…


  • Office 365: Clearing Mailbox Stops At 30 GB

    Recently at work, we needed to make a shared account for some API credentials to a service. Not wanting to tie them to any individual user, I thought we could create a new proxy address, assign it to a shared mailbox that all relevant people had access to, and sign up with that. I quickly…


  • Wishlist: Apple TV Gaming

    As an Apple nerd, I regularly chat with my friends about things Apple is doing or that we wish Apple was doing. A recent thought of mine that I shared with the group seemed to resound with basically everyone, though: a gaming-centric version of the Apple TV. We’re already at a point where games in…


  • Groovy FastStringService RuntimeException

    One of the systems I use at work is a Java-based SaaS platform. This platform makes itself extensible by allowing for custom scripting to be done on it via Groovy, a scripting language that runs on the JVM. This is a fairly common setup that I’ve seen on a variety of platforms over the years,…


  • Helm With K3s On Ubuntu

    I’ve recently needed to use Helm with K3s on Ubuntu. helm is a separate application from Kubernetes that uses the standard K8s APIs in order to interface with whatever Kubernetes cluster it’s pointed at. On Ubuntu, it’s not available via apt and must be installed as a Snap: Helm will typically source its connection URL…


  • Youk Boston Scally Flatcap

    As you may guess from the theme of this site, we’re fans of flatcaps here at the Geeky Blinders. I have a variety of flat caps that I’ve been wearing for the past year or so, many of which are in traditional patterns like herringbone or a newsboy style. While these caps look great, the…


  • Proton Pass Desktop Application

    Earlier this month, Proton Pass released a new desktop application. I had written previously about using Proton Pass, and my only real gripe was: While the browser extension worked great in Firefox, I still like using Safari on macOS since it gives me a nice, consistent experience across my MacBook, iPhone, and iPad. While I…