Jon Nagel's Personal Notes
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When company standards fight with the tools.

Who wins? This is a more recent story for once, but it's something that should be shared now. What happens when you standardize a company's way of setting up their Jenkins Pipelines, Terraform code, and Ansible playbooks? Great things, and reproducibility, no? Absolutely. What happens when
Jul 28, 2025 3 min read

Tools I'm using to run D&D sessions.

Originally, I meant to include this as part of how I got into D&D and decided this probably should get its own spotlight. There's nothing special I think in how I'm running things, or doing my prep, but I think it's a
Apr 20, 2025 3 min read

Getting into TTRPGs and Becoming a DM

While setting up camp for the night on the side of the road, a heavy fog starts to roll in. The surrounding forest has gone silent. Roll a perception check You hear the rustle of a bush a ways away but chalk it up to the wind. As you finish
Oct 27, 2024 5 min read

Rebranding? Sorta…

Real talk? I've kinda been annoyed at myself for falling off posting content here. I've had a sort of uncomfortable experience with some extended burnout since March 2023. Due to a few situations with work and personal life, I kinda lost the passion to only focus
Jul 11, 2024 1 min read

Am I alive? Maybe....

It looks like me popping up once a year around this time is becomming the norm somehow. Life's had it's ups and downs, inside and out of work. Eventually I might share some of it. Consider this a placeholder for some rambling to come soon.
Mar 7, 2024
My feelings on the Internet Archive vs. the Big Four Publishers

My feelings on the Internet Archive vs. the Big Four Publishers

It's probably a mildly spicy take, but I 100% believe Internet Archive's National Emergency Library was a mistake, and they deserved the lawsuit. BUT, I hope they win their appeal, or some good at a federal level comes out of this. Let me explain. The National
Mar 25, 2023 3 min read

Upgrading the Blog – Software design struggles

It's been a bit, and it's been busy. This one will definitely feel a little more rambly. A few months back when I started writing up content, the blog platform software that I use to run the blog, Ghost, started not subtly letting me know that
Mar 18, 2023 7 min read

Automating the creation of the virtual Kubernetes cluster - Part 1

Progress has been finally made with the next step of building out my new server. It took a while to get to this point, mostly because there's no clear documentation to do all the things that I wanted to piece together. Let's take a recap of
Jan 28, 2023 8 min read
Charity Streams, Learning, and Improvements for the future

Charity Streams, Learning, and Improvements for the future

Today is the 6th of November. Last night, I survived the toughest thing I will do this year. I streamed for 25 hours in support of Extra Life [https://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=cms.home] on Extra Life Day. It's not the toughest thing because raising
Nov 6, 2022 5 min read

Hiccups in automating the new server

There's some good and bad news with the new server.... Lets start with the good. I've automated 80%, got it stood up and have migrated most of my data over to it. All the important, everyday bits are being run from it instead of my old
Oct 9, 2022 3 min read

New Server and Automating the Install

Last summer (2021) I came into some new hardware to replace my my current home server. With 5x the cores (and 10x the threads), and with nearly 6x the performance, I wanted to rethink of how I leverage the server. I had gotten used to either running things on the
Sep 1, 2022 4 min read

Free or Open Source software, and the 100k lb gorillas in the room

A couple days ago, I was listening to Coder Radio episode 448 [ https://coder.show/448], and they mentioned the whole faker.js and colors.js fiasco that went down last week. Work's kept me quite busy this past week or so, so I missed the whole thing
Jan 16, 2022 3 min read

Discovering limitations of Postgres...

This is probably going to come off more as a rant than anything, apologies now... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On and off for the last 5 years I've had a personal project (eventually I'll go into detail) I pick up for a bit when i decide it's
Jul 25, 2021 5 min read

Functional API Design and Documentation

Whether you're working on a traditional REST API or building something out using AWS Gateway, eventually (read: you should be doing it from the start) you may need to start documenting your functions and endpoints. At work we've been building out API for standardizing various automation
Jul 10, 2021 3 min read

Docker Escalation Privileges and Remediation

This isn't exactly the post I planned on writing to break my writers block, but it's the one I needed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I was listening to the podcast Linux Unplugged episode #395 [https://linuxunplugged.com/395] and they had a little hacker challenge to see who could
Jun 5, 2021 4 min read

Absence, mixed messages of motivation and finding a balance

Hey there, It's been a long long time, and I'm mad and sad about that. No really. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I started this as an outlet to share some of the stuff that I've done with either my home setup or stuff that is tangentially connected
Dec 13, 2020 2 min read

Part 2 of Kubernetes in LXD - Working but unstable...

Last weekend I managed to get Kubernetes running in LXD, but not using Kubernetes the Hard Way. I'll explain the journey in a little bit, but first I want to step ahead to today and say I'm putting the rest of this project on hold temporarily.
Mar 15, 2020 4 min read

Part 1 of getting Kubernetes in LXD working.

I have a different setup for my homelab/selfhosted server. I've always been more infrastructure leaning with my take on technology and for the most part resisted using Docker with hosting in my personal stuff. I always enjoy setting up the VMs and the requirements to run the
Feb 28, 2020 2 min read

Stupid simple watch fix

One of my favorite watches is a Fairfield Chronograph from Timex. Earlier today i thought it was broken. The second hand of the chronograph wasn't stopped at 0 and I couldn't get it to reset. Apparently, the fix is easy. I followed this video: In less
Feb 27, 2020

Finding unity in OpenVPN and macvlan

Brief intro on my setup. I have a small server that I run pretty much everything out of. It's been a personal playground for about 4-5 years now. To try and keep the base system clear from mistakes and stupidity, I run things in lxc containers. I started
Feb 26, 2020 3 min read
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