the toolbox / tech
docker
10 notes use this.
- Oct 9, 2026 Patching the harbour master's charts I'd been scheduling the game site's socials through Buffer, and the plan was to move them onto the planner I self-host. Then I sat down to recreate a normal week of posts and ran aground on the first one. Buffer lets you choose an Instagram post, reel or story, tick the box that says a post was… infrastructure
- Oct 7, 2026 Teaching the harbour master to speak WordPress For a while, getting anything out meant three different browser tabs. A note here had its own editor and its own login. The business site's explainers went through a different admin entirely, images uploaded one at a time. The game site's queue was its own CMS, with its own idea of what a category… infrastructure
- Oct 2, 2026 A bell on the quarterdeck At five past three on a Friday afternoon, the VPS that runs two of my production apps hit 94.8% disk. A cold backup was staging Docker images on it and the images were big. There was about 3 GB left before databases start refusing writes, and nobody knew, least of all me, because I was reading… control
- Sep 30, 2026 The key to the lifeboat was on the ship A few weeks ago, in Launching the lifeboat, I wrote that every backup in the fleet now gets restored for real once a week, and that the keys and env files, saved nowhere before, now go off the box nightly, encrypted. Both of those are still true. This week the content planner joined the fleet, and… infrastructure
- Sep 12, 2026 Seaworthy enough to launch The restore system finally got the part that matters: a button that reaches into a live database or folder and puts a named backup back, with the undo taken automatically before it touches anything. Once that stopped being a hope and started being a mechanism, the project itself was steady enough for the other thing that had been sitting on the list: a real version number, and a container someone other than me can pull. infrastructure · control
- Sep 6, 2026 The visitor's gallery I run my projects out of bosun-x, and not all of them under the same name. One of those names is a business site I take client work through, and a client there wanted to see where their projects were up to. So they have a login now, to the part of bosun-x that's theirs, their projects, the tasks I've shared, the ideas they've brought me, a thread to talk in. Same bosun-x I use, filtered down and wearing that site's skin. There was no second system to build. control · infrastructure
- Sep 3, 2026 Launching the lifeboat An earlier note built the backups but never restored one. Since then bosun-x runs every backup through a real restore once a week, into a throwaway database with no network and no name, and counts what comes back. Any database can be put back from a button that dumps the old contents first, so the move is reversible. The recovery order is written down. And the keys and env files, saved nowhere before, now go off the box nightly, encrypted. infrastructure · control
- Sep 2, 2026 Fitting out a home dockyard A start-to-finish walk through the setup I use to build things with an AI agent at home — the laptop you type on, an old laptop turned into an always-on server, where the projects and their state actually live, the plain-text control layer that keeps a dozen of them straight, and how it all joins into one private network once a project outgrows the house. Every term you might not know is a hover away. workstation · infrastructure · control
- Aug 30, 2026 The chart room How I keep twenty-odd projects, five machines, and two AI agents in sync from a single dashboard built entirely out of plain Markdown and YAML files. The folder layout, why every status check is recomputed live instead of stored, and the plain-text handoff format that lets two agents continue each other's work. control · standards
- Aug 29, 2026 A key with one job A container needed to read three remote machines over SSH without holding a key that could also root them. The exact authorized_keys options that pin a key to one read-only command and a single permitted tunnel, what each one does, and the break-in tests that prove it holds. Copy it for anything that has to phone home from inside a container. infrastructure