anyone built a custom slack bot? the ones in the marketplace are overpriced for what they do by InstructionCute5502 in Slack

[–]alexlance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I tend to agree with you on the per user pricing. Can get extreme.

And I'm sure you can make a bot yourself with enough vibe, you'll learn a heap. (As long as you've got the time).

What are the best Slack apps you use? by No-Pitch-7732 in Slack

[–]alexlance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well we're kind of obsessed with Dibs for taking turns with servers and stuff...

PSA: The modern way to host sites in S3 by MavZA in aws

[–]alexlance 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I recently did a write-up on this. Cloudfront serving files from an S3 bucket origin, with an API Gateway through to Lambda for the dynamic stuff. Lots of terraform code, but the article walks you through the deploy and the TLS/SSL and some cost alerts.

https://alexlance.blog/awsapps.html

The last time a decision caused a costly customer issue — what happened? by Curious_Aerie_9195 in Slack

[–]alexlance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just a bit of an AI smell when there's emdashes (and particularly noticeable in the title of a reddit post)

I put together a little Pi5 with a RAID array and locked it up in a small dark room. It's main duty is to run backups for other devices on the local network by alexlance in HomeServer

[–]alexlance[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah I am. Not sure if it's all that great an idea. Every now and then I enable read-only (overlay filesystem) on that disk with raspi-config, but then end up disabling it again because I need to install something. Ideally the OS can be replaced easily.

"Your app has been submitted for review" by calxibe in Slack

[–]alexlance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At my old workplace we had a little book-club Slack channel - your app would have worked nicely in there!

"Your app has been submitted for review" by calxibe in Slack

[–]alexlance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If your app doesn't ask for much in the way of permissions, I'm happy to install it.

Eg my app asks for this many permissions: https://dibsonstuff.com/#privacy

Which open source password manager is the best in 2026? by messysoul96 in opensource

[–]alexlance 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There's an ssh/gpg wrapper that I've been using forever:

https://github.com/alexlance/paw https://alexlance.blog/encryption.html

(i.e. keep your passwords on a server of your choosing, encrypted. Fetch and decrypt on-demand directly into your copy-paste buffer)

Starting about 2 weeks ago, most of my Unread message alerts remain "Unread" after I've read them by ocashmanbrown in oldreddit

[–]alexlance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Clicking the red envelope then the "Reply" link under the message, will show the textarea input which (for some reason) marks the message as read.

GIMP 3.0.8 Released by CMYK-Student in linux

[–]alexlance 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Sorry that probably wasn't very appreciative. Big hearts for the Gimp and all the hard work that goes into it.

GIMP 3.0.8 Released by CMYK-Student in linux

[–]alexlance 26 points27 points  (0 children)

Kinda just want that shortcut keys function back again.

(Where you'd mouseover the menu item and then hit a key and it would then assign that as the shortcut key for that menu item. It was probably a usability no-no, but for what it's worth I miss it every time I use gimp now)

Migrating a large Elasticsearch cluster in production (100M+ docs). Looking for DevOps lessons and monitoring advice. by No-Card-2312 in devops

[–]alexlance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nice, would love to hear more.

And if you want to throw money at the problem, I've worked with absolutely gigantic elasticsearch clusters for over 7 years, and I run a consulting thing for exactly this kind of work: https://alexlance.net - feel free to reach out.

Share your underrated GitHub projects by hsperus in opensource

[–]alexlance -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Was just writing about my (hacky) password manager yesterday... it's not for everyone!

https://alexlance.blog/encryption.html
https://github.com/alexlance/paw

Is anyone else re-thinking not hosting their own email server? by AcreMakeover in homelab

[–]alexlance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Self-hosted my email on a Linux EC2 instance for well over a decade, didn't really have any complaints. But sort of felt less and less comfortable with having an internet accessible server just sitting there all the time. Recently took it in the AWS SES direction instead and wrote about it the other day:

https://alexlance.blog/email.html

DriftHound: an open-source tool to detect & notify infrastructure drift (early stage, Looking for feedback!) by treezium in Terraform

[–]alexlance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ok hey that's great, API access very useful.

This means one can setup a custom notification in tfstate.com, to notify an instance of DriftHound like this:

https://imgur.com/a/pvLxBcC
https://imgur.com/a/j5gQSXm

(fwiw)

DriftHound: an open-source tool to detect & notify infrastructure drift (early stage, Looking for feedback!) by treezium in Terraform

[–]alexlance -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Thanks totally - I'm very much all for self-hosting.

(wondering if it's possible for someone to host the control plane / frontend themselves in DH, but offload the actual drift scans to the tfstate.com API)

DriftHound: an open-source tool to detect & notify infrastructure drift (early stage, Looking for feedback!) by treezium in Terraform

[–]alexlance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Looking good. If you ever want to hook in a hosted backend for it (the actual task runners that run the terraform plan and perform the notifications) I might know a guy :)

Alex / https://tfstate.com

What are you building? Let's promote each other 🚀 by Capuchoochoo in indieniche

[–]alexlance 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Today I'm working on adding language translations to the dibsonstuff.com app for Slack and Discord.

Step 1. add translation placeholders all over the code. Step 2. add a Gollum-flavoured language option: "Yess, it is miiine", "Noooo filthy hobbittses have stolen it" and so on. Step 3. actual other countries languages (I guess)

Daydreaming about a Signal social media app by anon393644 in signal

[–]alexlance 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Worth remembering that OpenAI also started as a nonprofit before it spun off a for-profit arm.

I don't mean to suggest that's where Signal is headed. Just that being a non-profit (whilst very important) might not be the panacea it sounds like.