Tag: automation

A castle made of bazaar

Posted on by Morgan

I've accumulated quite a lot of nerd automations in my tech stack, I'll try to give an idea of what I've done up to this day

For the Cloudron instance I run

  • A cron job that monitor disk usage, using bash +Cloudron API, it will alert me via email and ntfy when any folder usage > 75%.
  • A cron job that checks if some apps time out and restart them via Cloudron API. In bash too.

DNS Monitoring

  • I take a snapshot of my Hetzner DNS configs every 5 minutes and watch frequently for diffs using Changedetection.

Uptime monitoring

  • I'm using Uptime Kuma to monitor the status pages of several services/APIs I'm relying on (Dropbox, OpenAI, Mistral AI, ...) as well as my own self-hosted apps. I get ntfy alerts in case any is failing.

Feed generators

Files Syncing

  • A cron job syncing my .torrent files from Dropbox to QBittorrent, using rclone
  • A cron job syncing my downloaded audiobooks to AudioBookShelf, using rsync.
  • A cron job syncing my downloaded ebooks to Calibre, by uploading the files to Calibre API, using bash.

Music management

  • A cron job syncing my downloaded music (torrent) to my main Music Library, using rsync.
  • A cron job verifying the quality of my Music Library content using mp3val and reporting for corrupted files via ntfy.
  • A cron job verifying the quality of my Soulseek download folder using mp3val and only moving the verified ones to my Music Library.
  • A user script integrating with ListenBrainz/LastFM scrobbler for when I listen to live radios from RTBF (they use radioplayer technology).
  • A user script to filter automatically the search results within Soulseek (web version running on Cloudron).

Photos management

  • A cron job that syncs my photos library between Dropbox and Immich, using rclone, but only for pics and videos under a certain size.
  • A cron job that generate Immich album only made of pictures of specific persons.
  • Scripts that I run ad-hoc, using ffmpeg, to compress my pictures, videos, fix their EXIF date at need.
  • Scripts that I run ad-hoc, using Syncthing, to remove all pics/videos from my Phone (WhatsApp and Camera folders) and move them to Dropbox, before I compress and triage them. Anything on Dropbox is then sync to Immich, so that's how I keep my phone clean.

Emails management

  • A script which checks for invoices (with attachments or downloadable links) in my emails and sends them to my Dropbox forwarding email, which in turn backups those attachments in a specific folder which can be treated.

Freelancer paperwork management

  • I have several scripts to rename my receipts and invoices with the right date, invoice nr, provider and organize them per year/quarter/month, it's done in PHP.
  • A user script to fill my timesheet automatically based on my declared days off.

Web curation and bookmark management

  • A cron job that will browse my recent Shaarli shares and, when needed, add tags, HN Thread links, Web Archive link, and a summary. It's done in Python.
  • A cron job that will browse my Miniflux unread entries and mark as read the ones that I will probably not care about. using Mistral AI.
  • A cron job that will browse my Miniflux unread entries and send me an email with the unread entries summarized and grouped by feed, a bit like feu Subworthy.com (by Phil Stephens) was doing around 2022.
  • A user script that will add TLDRs buttons at the bottom of my Miniflux entries, so I can get a quick summary generated by Mistral AI, at need.
  • A user script to warn me on any website if there is a Hacker News thread for the page I visit.
  • A user script to highlight and extract all top links from the current Hacker News thread.

LinkedIn management

  • A user script that adds a reply generator in LinkedIn conversations, using Mistral AI.

Obsidian Backups

  • I'm using aicommit2 called from Obsidian Git plugin to generate meaningful commit messages about what is being backed up.

This looks quite a lot, and that's not all.

The art of crafting and loving your own tools

Posted on by Morgan

I have learned one good lesson from tasting someone's else food, it's never salty enough and I always miss the good drink pairing or something else is missing. And I'll feel bad for making any critique or special request.

I have a similar feeling about apps, tools and platforms I don't maintain. Sure i can help fixing them with requests that will likely be forgotten in their backlog. Or I can pick an alternative product which will unfortunately lack features from the former or will have their own ux issues, bugs, weirdness...

In the end I'll flavor ones that focus on simplicity and which provide good documentation and support for data import/export and customizations through their API or through plugins and scripting.

Miniflux, Shaarli, Obsidian, Dropbox, Cloudron....are those kinds of apps and platforms I use that do a thing well yet I have customized to my taste, e.g of such personalizations:

  • Dropbox is automatically organized based on custom rules, all orchestrated through cron jobs.
  • Bookmarks in Shaarli are tagged automatically thanks to a plugin I've made available in my shaarli_plugins Git repository.
  • My apps hosted in Cloudron are restarted automatically on schedule if they stop responding, thanks to some cron jobs and Cloudron's API.
  • Music I download on-the-go from my mobile phone through Seeker (Soulseek client) is synced automatically to my storage and visible in my Navidrome and Subsonic clients; so I do not need Spotify. It is also orchestrated via cron jobs, using rsync and syncthing.
  • Notes I take on my Obsidian at work and at home are synced automatically thanks to Syncthing an Git on my personal Gitea server.
  • Miniflux is the tool I've extended the most as I've blogged in Reading RSS in peace with a few Miniflux Hacks, e.g:
    • organize the feed categories in Miniflux.
    • group items by author.
    • show stats about each feed.
    • highlight links I've already bookmarked in Shaarli.
    • add one-click buttons Add to Shaarli / Follow in Miniflux next to each link mentioned in those articles depending if it's some RSS feed or a random link I might want to bookmark in Shaarli.
    • Some of those recipes are available in my repo.
  • Email attachments related to our financial activity are archived in our Dropbox and renamed automatically based on their content, using OCR. The whole thing simplifies communication with our accountant and their software.
  • My monthly invoices are generated automatically from InvoiceNinja and I'm looking at a solution using only Python.
  • I'm also making my own RSS feeds from sources that lack one like https://indieblog.page/all and https://www.journee-mondiale.com/les-journees-mondiales.htm, I've shared the source code for indieblog and for journee-mondiale, both are orchestrated via cron jobs.
  • I keep building more, I'm working on my own tools to supplement or replace InvoiceNinja, Shaarli, Wallabag, Obsidian and Miniflux. The fewer apps I rely on, the more focused I become.

Relying on my own recipes, scheduling things though cron jobs and building my own platform saves me costs, improve my computer experience and make me more efficient about problem solving.

It also likely make me a bit lazier and annoying.

You can be more efficient too, and I can help if you like!

πŸ’Œ The best way to get in touch is via my email morgan at zoemp dot be. You can also follow me on the Fediverse / Mastodon at @sansguidon@mamot.fr. I speak (a lot) French, English and a bit of Dutch.

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