Justin Cardoza

This has been a long time coming, with a lot of preparation and research involved, but it’s finally time. I’m switching to Linux for my everyday computing after using Windows almost exclusively on the desktop for the majority of my life. I’ll explain a bit more about why, but if you’re just curious about my new setup, here it is:

• Framework laptop, refurbished edition with a Core i5-1135G7
• 2x USB-C ports, 1x USB-A, and 1x HDMI
• SK Hynix Gold P31 2TB SSD for lots of fast, power-efficient storage
• Crucial RAM from the compatibility list, 32GB of DDR4-3200
• Fedora Xfce

I’ve been using restic for backups for a few months now, and there are a lot of great resources out there to get started setting that up. However, most tutorials will have you store application keys and passwords in plaintext, which is not ideal from a security standpoint. I spent some time figuring out a better way, and I’m sharing what I discover on Github!

I’ve just published a new software package on Github and NPM called test-ease which is ready to use if you need a simple, straightforward, lightweight testing framework. I think this is going to be a great solution for testing small and medium software projects, and I plan to use it in a couple of other projects I’m working on now. In fact, that’s why I wrote it.

I’ve been playing Blades in the Dark with my family and some friends this year, and it is a ton of fun. I’m sure you’ve heard of Dungeons and Dragons, probably the most iconic entry in the tabletop role-playing category — Blades is a little like that. The gameplay is a bit simpler, using only d6 dice, and the world is much darker and more supernatural-oriented. That’s not to say it can’t still be lighthearted, though.

I love macro photography. Something about picking out tiny details that the human eye can’t see is very satisfying, and it opens up whole worlds to explore right under our noses. I also love photographing pets, and while we don’t currently have any pets (we want to wait until we’re able to get a house), my family has plenty to go around. My sister’s cat is particularly photogenic:

Moving from WordPress to JAMstack has been an interesting journey, although not nearly as challenging as I expected. One of the migration tasks that did give me a little trouble, however, was setting up a custom 404 error page.

I am very excited to say that I am finally getting back into my photography hobby! A little while ago I got a great deal on a Sony A7R II, which may be a slightly older camera now, but it’s still a massive upgrade from my first one (even when that camera was fully working). I’m also having fun trying out vintage SLR lenses using adapters.

WordPress has been a wonderful CMS for my website these past few years. I’ve enjoyed working with it, I’ve learned a ton from it, and I’ve developed a deep respect for its power. For the right website, it’s a fantastic publishing tool, and I’m sure it will be for years to come. However, at least for this website, my time with it has sadly come to an end. I just don’t need most of the features it provides on my small personal blog/portfolio, and it’s been time to upgrade to a better hosting situation for a while.

I haven’t done much with my website lately; apart from security updates, I’ve been too overwhelmed with work and life to write much this year. And what a year it’s been already! That’s not why I’m writing this post though.

I got the notification to update to WordPress 5.5 earlier this week, so I logged in, did the update, and glanced at a few pages to make sure everything worked okay. Usually it does, but this time, some of the images in my posts were looking pretty gnarly:

Raspberry Pi computers are great for so many low-power applications, hence my obsession with them, and one of the popular projects I’ve read about is making one into a security camera. Home security and automation are topics I’m very interested in, so I went ahead and built a security camera to try the concept out. I decided to use a Pi Zero W for its small size and particularly low power requirements, and I was also able to find what I’m pretty sure is the original version of the Raspberry Pi camera on Amazon for less than $9.