@mrnullone

Schools love to make it hard to enjoy things on the internet. On macOS, you often need some sort of proxy server running locally that forwards remote traffic. Issue is, sometimes this server hangs, etc. To help this, you can use a LaunchAgent, which is similar to a systemd unit file for macOS. Even then, the proxy can get stale, especially after closing and reopening the laptop.

To get around this, in the past I’d use unlicensed launchcontrol and direct clients to download this and show them the very specific tiny button required to reload the agent. People aren’t very good at learning tho and it caused some headaches.

To solve this issue, I hacked together this simple GUI application in SwiftUI (my first time using it!) that wrapped launchctl (the interface for launchd, which controls the agents). It provides two simple easy to use buttons, that allow restarting stale connections, and also parses the label names of the agents to create human readable names for the people that don’t know what com.sidestep.socksproxy means.

Working on this project for my FIRST robotics team that indexes outreach opportunities (opportunities to help out within the community and beyond). Right now it’s just a basic “create events” and “view events” with rather crude styling, but as it develops it’ll have much more features. At some point, it’ll feature cloudflare web scraping to automatically find events.

so I have this android tv that sits in my homelab.. it’s kinda bland when it’s just off. (first image)

a few months ago I vibecoded the shit out of a dashboard that kinda half worked and took genuinely like 70 minutes to compile. I like the idea of a dashboard but not when it’s nonfunctional and I don’t even know how it works. (second image)

I decided to rewrite it, in tauri with a sveltekit frontend, and make it “my way”, including an expanded set of widgets. first things first I need to lay it out. In the past, I’ve heavily relied on AI to assist me with styling and frontend design so this time around I challenged myself to use zero AI, and I’m really happy with the result. Stylistically, the frontend is done, so all I need to do now is actually add functionality to it.

The list of current widgets (third image):

• Time and date
• Now playing (spotify api)
• local weather (openmeteo api)
• calendar (google calendar + 3 upcoming events)
• Proxmox server resource statistics (beszel api)
• Bambu Lab print information