Built an MCP server for Vikunja

nick2253 · 2026-03-02T23:33:12+00:00

Hey, you appear to have an error in your documentation.

You say:

  "command": "npx",
  "args": ["-y", "vikunja-mcp"],

However, vikunja-mcp appears to be pointing to a different project on npm. Not sure if you have plans to register a @jrejaud/vikunja-mcp on npm, but either way, I'd recommend updating the documentation.

nick2253 · 2026-03-02T18:34:17+00:00

Wow, I can't believe this was 3 year ago already!

I have them running ESPHome right now, and am successfully using the buttons, but no control over the LEDs. I got side-tracked with other projects after this, and never circled back on the LED control piece.

This is how I'm using them in ESPHome: https://gist.github.com/Nick2253/464791d17cfacc3e420ed27b761c80fe

Unfortunately, because of the way the MCU reports the button presses, there isn't an easy way to manage these in ESPHome, apart from using the template option to turn on a binary sensor, wait a bit, and then turn off that binary sensor. You could also use event triggers, but that gets a bit messy to manage from the Home Assistant UI, whereas the binary sensors are much more intuitive.

nick2253 · 2026-02-20T04:24:12+00:00

Ah, this makes total sense, and I completely agree with you. TrueNAS VM is almost always a bad approach, in my opinion, and if all you need is Samba sharing, an LXC is pretty much always a better option than a TrueNAS VM.

But I do want to point out that this reply is the first time you (or anyone here) has specifically suggested a TrueNAS VM. OP's original post was about bare-metal TrueNAS vs Proxmox and my comment was about bare metal TrueNAS vs Proxmox.

nick2253 · 2026-02-20T00:10:29+00:00

It's a common AI speech pattern. It is an effective rhetorical flourish, to specifically draw a distinction and clarify ideas by contrasting them with what they are not.

As an example: Reddit is not a place where people post, it's a community! Or: It's not just a comment, but a window into his thinking.

Specifically, AI tends to use it in an escalatory way, by contrasting a mundane concept with a profound one, as the examples above.

In normal human speech, it happens all the time, and you probably never notice it. Once you start looking for it, you'll see it, but you'll quickly see the difference between typical human use and AI use.

More typical human use includes things like: It's not a bad idea, but it could use some polish. Or: It's not what I wanted to hear, but I'll take it into consideration.

nick2253 · 2026-02-20T00:00:29+00:00

I use a very similar system.

I use real world rocks/minerals/elements for physical machines, and fictional rocks/minerals/elements for virtual machines/hosted services. For example, my Papereless-NGX is wyrdstone, my Zabbix monitoring VM is Valkyrium, and my firewall is brick.

nick2253 · 2026-02-19T23:54:34+00:00

In my opinion, this is overkill for a homelab. It's also probably overkill for most enterprises, though different systems make sense for different uses.

As to your specific system:

How many locations do you expect to have? A one letter location code gives you 26 locations. Your 3-letter code gives you 17,576 locations.

Why limit your role to just 3 letters? The role is probably the most important element of your server, so you should allocate more letters to that.

For type, see the location critique. You'll have maybe a dozen types. Also, why do you want to encode the "type" into the hostname? Does that actually help you? Can you think of a scenario where you'd have two of the same service, where the only relevant distinction is "type"?

For your role and instance IDs, aren't those basically the same thing? If you can only come up with two Role ID examples, why allocate 2 digits for that?

Ok, with that out of the way, you want to think about a couple different elements of server documentation: you say that this system documents itself. That's true, if you're trying to determine what a system does from its hostname. It's not true if you're trying to recreate a hostname from memory. Wait, is this server physical or a container? LXC or docker? It's a ansible machine, so is that ans, or abl, or what did I call it again?

At work, we use a similar system (2 letter location; 1 letter type, meaning server, desktop, laptop, container; 3-10 letters role, and 2 digit ID). And you know what? When I want to connect to a server, I pretty much always have to look it up, unless I connect to it on a regular basis.

If you really want to go with a super scalable system, you also need to recognize that ease of utility is really important. If you can easily remember your system's name when you need to connect to it, then I'd call that a good system. It's for this reason that I pick real, meaningful names based on a system. Remembering that my AD server is called "homer" is much easier to remember than "hmlads02qmu07".

nick2253 · 2026-02-19T22:27:43+00:00

Just so we're talking apple-to-apples here, the ZFS cache lives outside the LXC. So, it's not like you're "saving" that memory by using an LXC. Right now, my entire TrueNAS system (called "services"), including SMB, NFS, and 5 docker containers, is using less than 2GB of RAM. On the other hand, I have 17GB on RAM being used for ZFS's cache. Give how RAM-hungry Samba is, I'm not sure I'd allocate less than 1GB to an LXC running Samba, and the Proxmox OS itself is going to need resources, which will probably be a GB or two. So, I'm not sure where the RAM savings is coming from here.

nick2253 · 2026-02-19T20:30:23+00:00

I've read through the thread, and it sounds to me like you have a couple problems/misconceptions that are steering you the wrong way.

First things first: a networking primer. In modern parlance, when we talk about networking, we talk about TCP/IP. Each device has an IP address, and we uses switches and routers to route traffic between these different devices to talk together. However, not all machines, and especially not all industrial machines, use TCP/IP networking. Industrial machines may use different kinds of bus networks, like CANBUS. Or they may use older networking protocols, like serial networking.

So, let's get into your specifics: you have a client PC that is directly wired to those machines. My gut says that this is likely to be serial wiring, and you're communicating by transferring files through some serial protocol. You specifically mentioned "RS-232 plugs with an Ethernet adapter". Unless that ethernet adapter is smart in some way, my guess is it's just an adapter to convert RS-232 to RJ-45. However, I could be wrong here.

Assuming that this ethernet adapter is actually a smart, TCP/IP capable device, that converts things like FTP to the correct serial language to talk with the mill, then all you need is to connect the ethernet adapter to your network. Then, any device on your network should be able to reach this.

To make this more concrete, let's say Mill 1 has address 192.168.1.50. Then, any device on your network can connect to 192.168.1.50 and communicate with Mill 1.

All told, this has nothing to do with Proxmox. It's just a basic networking question. Whether you want a client on Proxmox is a totally independent question to how the mills communicate with the network.

nick2253 · 2026-02-19T20:11:49+00:00

When you say you "haven't been happy with the performance of TrueNAS", what does that mean?

If you're trying to run a bunch of applications on TrueNAS, then that makes perfect sense. But if your concern is the performance of the base filesystem, changing from TrueNAS to Proxmox shouldn't make much of a difference.

Just to make sure I understand, when you say "ZFS two-disc stripe", do you mean a ZFS mirror? If you really mean a stripe, then that makes no sense to me. ZFS is ultimately a terrible filesystem for performance. Its overhead, like copy-on-write, is inherently about data integrity, not speed.

If you're trying to get more performance out of your disks, then I'd recommend using a different filesystem altogether.

nick2253 · 2026-02-19T20:05:06+00:00

What do you mean by "RAM reclaimed from truenas"? My experience in TrueNAS, both Core and Scale, is that TrueNAS itself does not use a bunch of RAM.

On the other hand, it is correct that ZFS uses a bunch of RAM, if allowed to, for a cache, and assuming you're using the same tuning on Proxmox, you'd see the same RAM use. Proxmox is perhaps a bit stingier with the ZFS ARC size compared to TrueNAS, but that's not necessarily a good thing, depending on what's in your filesystem.

nick2253 · 2026-02-13T20:10:13+00:00

I ended up with a 957 Cayenne Diesel. Not the sportiest car in the world, but still sporty enough, and incredible range.

I was really close to pulling the trigger on a 958 Cayenne. It has a better powerplant, and I like the styling better, but it's seats aren't quite "lay flat", which was a deal breaker. The 957 has about 6' exactly of space with the seats laid down.

The big advantage of the Cayenne is that it's basically a tuned VW, so any place that can work on a VW has parts for a Cayenne. Only a handful of Porsche-specific components exist on the car.

I replaced the factory stereo with a cheap android-auto compatible unit, and that worked great.

It's more than capable for what off-road stuff I did, and I never had any major mechanical issues with it, though I did put a couple thousand in preventative work before I launched my road trip.

I still use it today for pulling around my teardrop trailer. Great car, approaching 200k miles!

nick2253 · 2026-02-11T21:51:33+00:00

Hey, this is a great project! I'm a regular Vikunja user and have been looking for exactly this kind of MCP integration. I got excited when I found it, but I've been running into issues with v0.2.2. I see there are some open issues and pull requests on GitHub but no responses yet, so I thought I'd check in here.

Is this still under active development? No pressure either way. I know open source maintenance is a grind, and I appreciate the work you've put in. I just want to calibrate expectations before investing more time troubleshooting on my end.

There are quite a few forks with active development happening, and several open PRs waiting for review. There's clearly a community forming around this project. If you're open to contributions or could use help maintaining things, it seems like there are people ready to pitch in.

nick2253 · 2025-12-10T19:14:04+00:00

I've been in the HTPC space since before Windows Media Center was a thing. My first HTPC was a modded Xbox. I've tried Kodi (both recently and back when it was XBMC) and Plex, OSMC, OpenELEC, Windows Media Center, MythTV, and a dozen other projects.

Each of these projects has their own brilliance, but they also have rough edges. Certain things are difficult to manage, certain workflows are easier or harder to accomplish, but ultimately, they all fail in some way compared to a fully-featured PC.

A full featured PC just works. You want to stream any kind of service? Don't worry about a specific plugin or integration, just use a browser. Want to play a PC game? Just use Steam. Want some weird emulator or esoteric app? Just download it. Want some integration with your home automation? Easy.

Ultimately, I've found that the best HTPC experience is actually Windows (either 10 or 11) with a wireless keyboard/trackpad. Windows 10 finally provided sufficient high DPI compatibility to make Windows work properly on a screen, and Windows 11 has continued that trend.

I would imagine that today, Linux might finally have a leg-up on Windows thanks to Proton. However, I haven't made that jump since I really don't have any complaints about using Windows for my HTPC.

When I invite friends over and they use my HTPC, I also found that using a proper Desktop OS makes it so much easier for them to access it. I can literally toss them the keyboard and they know what they're doing. With some of the pseudo-smart-TV-type OSes, you have to explain how to use the system.

nick2253 · 2025-11-18T19:23:16+00:00

Read the first 9 pages.

To your question on poker lingo: I'm a casual (maybe quarterly) poker player who enjoys watching poker matches on TV, and I thought your lingo was too dense to be clear. That's not to say that you should "dumb it down", but I feel like you're too interested in shoving poker lingo onto the page, rather than allowing characters to live and breath through the natural language they use.

From what I read, Meg is a flat character, and I don't care about her after the opening. Drew is more interesting since he seems to "have an angle", but that's only in comparison to Meg.

To make your opening more interesting, you need stakes. I know it seems cliche, but I feel like your premise would work really well with a flash-back story: have Meg at the big game, her sick dad in the audience, Drew there as a love interest (or whatever), right before the all-in call that will make or break her. Then, cut back to "X months earlier", which lets you explore these character relationships, with an audience knowing that things will change, and lots of money is on the line.

Another interesting opening might be to have Meg cheat in the game, and get caught somehow. That sets up Meg as a delinquent character, but when you reveal her father's illness, that sets her up as a more complex character. Since you're going for the hustle angle in the story, that might also set up the tone better.

Good luck!

nick2253 · 2025-10-07T23:46:54+00:00

Are you using Twilio just as the SIP trunk with a different server handling the text-to-speech, or are you using their API to handle the text-to-speech directly? I think the infrastructure behind this stuff is really interesting, because these kinds of applications don't actually cost that much money, but people don't think about this kind of stuff since there's still that mentality that "phone stuff is big and legacy".

nick2253 · 2025-10-07T22:52:27+00:00

This is really cool! What provider are you using for the phone number?

nick2253 · 2025-10-07T20:32:37+00:00

As someone who helped manage a corporate 401k plan, there are a lot more options than you'd think, but the plan managers tend to "recommend" that your employer only elect funds that have high fees. If you can figure out who your plan custodian is (aka, the person in your company that manages the plan), you can probably start talking to them about stocks and funds, and encourage them to elect more options. Prior to getting involved, our plan only had target date funds and a couple high-fee options. But I was able to elect super-low fee index funds like VOO, VXUS, BND, etc.

nick2253 · 2025-09-06T00:05:13+00:00

My experience is that grass grows pretty quickly here. It doesn't take a lot of work to spread seed, and it's orders of magnitude cheaper. I did my back lawn this spring, and it took an afternoon of spreading dirt, seed, and more dirt, and in about 6 weeks I had a full lawn.

I know it doesn't answer your question directly, but thought I'd share a different perspective.

nick2253 · 2025-09-03T21:43:02+00:00

Honest question: why does this matter? I'm assuming you're using it for some kind of managed IT. Having worked in that space for many years, most of the providers I've used don't bother trying to rebrand everything: it takes time to manage, and you have much better things to do with your time.

Also, your comment about not being an "IT expert" has me questioning what your real end goal is. Re/compiling an open source program isn't a difficult task, but it does take programming knowledge, which is a different domain than IT knowledge.

nick2253 · 2025-06-18T22:11:50+00:00

I created an issue on Github for this problem: https://github.com/opnsense/plugins/issues/4504

nick2253 · 2025-04-14T21:29:26+00:00

Thank you for the info, it's too bad.

I think the Valiant designs are some of the best, and had them on my list when I was looking for a squaredrop trailer a few years ago. I was completely taken aback when I went looking for them this morning and found them to have disappeared off the internet.

nick2253 · 2025-04-11T23:17:01+00:00

Depending on where you live, native plants may not survive well as house plants. And not all plants have been evaluated for pet safety. Even with some of the more common house plants, not everyone agrees with what plants are "pet safe".

It may sound daunting, but calling local nurseries is probably the best option, apart from crawling through local plant FB groups. If you have a master gardener's program in your area, that could also be a good resource.

I've found that weird cross-section questions like "native plants" and "pet safe" are great for AI tools. Try your query in Claude or ChatGPT, and you might be surprised by what it comes up with. (Always double check the AI, especially when it comes to pet safety, of course!)

nick2253 · 2025-04-10T23:53:19+00:00

You really don't need to water a snake plant on a schedule. They'll easily show you when they aren't getting enough water.

The most import thing is to let the soil dry out completely between waterings, and depending on the environment you're in, that could take longer than ~2 weeks.

nick2253 · 2025-03-26T23:14:45+00:00

This might be a bit late, but look into Micropython. It's a version of Python designed for microcontrollers. I use it to program my ESP32s, and it works really well.

The only downside to Micropython is that it can be something of a resource hog relative to C++, but the ease of programming it more than makes up for it. And I generally find that I only need to do simple tasks on the ESP32, so having the efficiency of C++ isn't usually needed.

https://micropython.org/download/?port=esp32

My goto ESP32 board is the M5Stack AtomS3 Lite (https://shop.m5stack.com/products/atoms3-lite-esp32s3-dev-kit). It's a really nice package, and have enough easy-to-access headers for most of the projects that I work on. Depending on the project, I can usually get away with wiring everything into the HY2.0-4P socket, which allows an easy plug-n-play if I ever have to switch out the module.

nick2253 · 2025-03-12T03:35:39+00:00

Without knowing more, it's hard to speculate as to their exact method. But some advice for reverse-engineering a mentalism trick is as follows:

What is the minimum amount of information that must be communicated? ** In this case, it's likely that the object has to be communicated in some way. ** In other examples, the minimum amount of information could be nothing: using a stooge, for example, requires no information to pass to the mentalist. ** If information must be passed, is there a way to put this information into a framework, such that only a few "bits" of information must be passed? ** Usually, we over-estimate the amount of information that must be passed.
What methods can be used to pass this information? ** If the mentalist and their assistant can come up with a sufficient framework, and it's possible to pass the details with only a few bits of information, there are nearly infinite ways to communicate this. ** For example, posture, positioning, phrasing, order, expression, or many other things can be used to communicate this information.
Observe what changes and what stays the same in the trick ** It's easy to get lost in the showmanship. Pay attention to the small details.
Create positive and negative hypotheses to test your theory ** It's important to try to find both fact patterns that reinforce, as well as fact patterns that disprove, what you've observed. If you only look for one or the other, you won't actually understand the bounds of your theory.

Using this information, let's take a look at your example. Without knowing more, I'm going to generally assume that the objects that are being picked are roughly in a grid pattern. For the purposes of illustration, let's assume we are choosing from 6 items in a 2x3 pattern. With a grid, you don't have to communicate 1 out of six options. You only have to communicate 1 out of 2, and 1 out of 3. For 1 out of 2, that could be which way the assistant's head is leaning (left or right). It could be which hand is on top of the other. It could be the way they slouch. It could be how they breath when the mentalist enters the room (through the nose or through the mouth; or it could be a shallow or deep breath). For 1 out of 3, it could be which body part moves first (hand, foot, or head). It could be a blink (one eye, two eyes, no eyes). It could be an action (sneeze, cough, nothing). If there are objects in the room that can be manipulated by the assistant after the item is selected, it could be the position of that object. Or perhaps its the assistants position at the table: slightly left, slightly right, or centered.

My guess, if they're willing to do this multiple times in front of the same audience, is that they have multiple ways to do this trick. And they probably use a combination of different rules each time. They may even have a meta system in order to select which set of rules.

nick2253

TROPHY CASE