K

Kyle Sferrazza

notes, projects, /etc

Notes and PKM Apps Compared

Some pros/cons of the notes and knowledge management apps I’ve tried. Obsidian Very snappy Wiki links and knowledge graph Lots of community plugins Closed source No Task management by default Canvases Logseq Customizable EDN queries for daily note page Heavier weight than Obsidian Open source Close to Solarized Dark by default :) Wiki links and knowledge graph Outlines only — all documents have bullets Org-mode support for TODOs is cool but the app tends to put weird org-style metadata ...
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NUC Cluster Updates

After setting up lots and lots of virtual machines and container-based workloads on my NUC cluster, I have made many changes to the underlying infrastructure since my last post. Harvester Using the community-maintained Proxmox docker machine driver turned out to be pretty finnicky and I would frequently end up throwing away nodes that never got started properly. Because of this frustration and the fact that most of my workloads are container-based rather than VM-based, I decided to try out Har...
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NUC Cluster

I recently acquired 4 Intel NUC devices, and have configured them as a compute cluster for various tasks. EDIT: see the updates article for the latest updates, including why I switched away from Proxmox and Ceph to Harvester and Longhorn. My goals for setting up the cluster: make everything (within reason) declarative and easily reproducible make sure at least one drive can die without causing data loss Most of the workloads I want to support on the cluster run in Kubernetes (k8s). I start...
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Hourglass

https://github.com/codegrade/hourglass/ Hourglass is a web-based exam server for Computer Science classes at Northeastern University. I co-developed this application with Professor Ben Lerner for use in Fundamentals of Computer Science 1 and 2. Hourglass utilizes various security features to detect anomalies in student submissions and alert course staff, who are then able to message students and decide whether to allow them to continue. There are also quite a few exam controls specific to Co...
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Bifrost

https://gitlab.com/kylesferrazza/bifrost ngrok is a great tool for exposing local services to the world with the magic of reverse proxies: Spend more time programming. One command for an instant, secure URL to your localhost server through any NAT or firewall. However, using ngrok with a custom domain is a paid feature, and there are usage limits on the free tier. Enter bifrost! The repo provides terraform scripts for setting up a free f1-micro instance on Google Cloud Platform, as well a...
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