OData Walked So GraphQL Could Run (and Sometimes Trip)

The Old Guard Meets the Hype Train OData has been around since before microservices were cool — quietly powering enterprise APIs while everyone else was busy reinventing REST for the 47th time. Then along comes GraphQL, all swagger and curly braces, promising flexibility, perfect queries, and eternal happiness (as long

ai

Stop Checking Dashboards — Let n8n Email You Google Analytics Reports Instead!

Do you still open Google Analytics every Monday to see if your website’s traffic went up? Yeah… same here — until I automated the whole thing. In this post, we’ll create a workflow that fetches your site metrics from Google Analytics, formats them into clean HTML, and emails

ai

LLMs at Ludicrous Speed: Dockerizing vLLM for Real Apps

If you’ve ever watched your GPU twiddle its thumbs between prompts, this one’s for you. In this post we’ll cover what vLLM is, why it’s fast, how to run it with Docker Compose, and how to test it with real calls. I’ll also show concrete

ai

Shrinking Giants: Understanding LLM Quantization Models (Q2, Q4, Q6 and Friends)

Why Quantization Matters Large Language Models (LLMs) are huge. Even a “small” 7B parameter model can chew up 14+ GB in FP16 (16-bit floating point). If you’ve tried running one locally without a beefy GPU, you’ve probably noticed your machine crying in pain—or worse, swapping memory

Technical

Tame the Family Chaos: Build a Smart Calendar with DAKboard + Raspberry Pi (Free Basic Tier Included)

Introduction Every family has the same struggle: keeping track of everyone’s schedules. Swimming lessons overlap with dentist appointments, grocery runs clash with homework deadlines, and before you know it—you’re double-booked for two birthday parties on the same Saturday. Enter DAKboard, a customizable digital display that transforms your

Technical

Cut LLM Costs: Access Your Home Ollama from the Cloud via Twingate

Running LLMs in the cloud can burn a hole in your wallet faster than a bad crypto investment. Costs are steep, and every token adds up. My workaround? I run Ollama on my PC at home and connect my cloud Linux VM to it using Twingate. That way, I get

Technical

It’s Never Too Early: From Light-O-Rama to xLights to Falcon Pi — Running My Christmas Show on a Raspberry Pi

Every December my neighbors ask the same question: “How do you make your Christmas lights dance to music?” The answer is a mix of commercial software, open-source tools, and a tiny Raspberry Pi working overtime in the brutal cold of Southern California (you know, when it drops below

c#

BattleBots + MCP = Fun: Building Custom Tools in C# That Your IDE and Workflows Understand

Opening AI copilots and IDE extensions are evolving fast, and Microsoft’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) is emerging as the glue that makes custom tools discoverable and usable by editors like VS Code and Visual Studio Insiders. For this post, I’ll be using .NET Core 10 along with Visual

Turning Hours of Gamer Rants into Searchable Gold with n8n and Supabase

Introduction Besides writing about software architecture and tinkering with homelabs, I also run a podcast: GamerTV Podcast. It’s a Spanish-language podcast about videogames, told from the perspective of two 40-something grumpy gamers — yours truly (Darth Seldon) and my co-host Mr. Chilangiux. We rant, reminisce, and sometimes even make

Pardon our dust

I am migrating to a newer engine, however I broke some images. Will fix them...! Sorry!!!!

c#

Local SonarQube + .NET! Catch Bugs Before They Catch You!!!

If you’ve been coding in C# for a while, you’ve probably run into that dreaded moment during a pull request: “Hey, can you add unit tests?” “Why are there magic strings?” “You missed a null check here…” Wouldn’t it be nice

Technical

Build Your Own Local AI Automation Hub with n8n + Ollama (No Cloud Required!)

If you’ve been playing with local LLMs like Llama 3.1 (8B) and are a fan of automation tools like n8n, you’re in for a treat. Today, we’ll connect n8n to your local Ollama instance (with Open WebUI) using Docker Compose. The result? Automated AI workflows that

Video Games

You need to watch this Final Fantasy VII Rebirth analysis

A video game post!!!! So random. Hear me out, it is not a surprise that 2 of my top 5 videogames of all time are Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth. It has so many lore, story depth, hidden plots, music; you name it. However, a lot of people did

Technical

HomeLab with Docker and Raspberry Pi 5.

A HomeLab is a personal, often DIY (do-it-yourself) setup of computer servers and networking equipment used for learning, experimentation, and sometimes practical tasks like hosting services. I have a couple Raspberry Pis as home servers where I can do quick proof of concepts, unit testing, code analysis and a lot

c#

.NET Interactive, NuGet Servers and Polyglot Notebooks. What is this Dark Magic?!

I write a bunch of Enterprise Libraries (fancy name for common code), and I have markdown guides on how to install and use it (via NuGet packages). But somehow, I always end up opening Visual Studio or VS Code and do a real time demo on how things work. But

c#

HTTPS POST and PlantUML, your best friend.

Hello!!! This will be a short post Currently I am working on automating the creation of PlantUML diagrams and embed them into Word documents and Excel Spreadsheets (Yes that is a thing) But instead of copying the image from the PlantUML server, I will be generating the diagram dynamically and

Video Games

StepMania/DDR. I am too old and tired to keep dancing. Kidding!!! No, I am not.

Well, I have not written a game post in a while, I think it is due. I have been playing Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) since the first version of the arcade came out and most of the iterations that came after (Yes, I am that old) I remember that when

c#

OData! Oh my!! So powerful indeed!!!

Welcome back, today we will talk about one of my favorite technologies. OData!! You don't know how many times this standard has save me time and discussions as it is a standard. What is OData? "The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a data access protocol built on

Technical

NTFY, not a typo, awesome tool for push notifications.

This is going to be a short post. NTFY, is a tool to send push notifications, specially to mobile. Why would you like to use this tool? Use cases that I can think of but not limited are * Check if a site is down * A long running task is done

c#

In memory cache and eviction with C#

Memory cache is a fast and easy way to retrieve data, objects, lists, etc.; that are accessed constantly. Not everything needs to be in-memory, you can use Redis as well to accomplish the same results. Bear in mind that memory may be "infinite" in the cloud, but costs

Technical

Submitting a Google form to Jira. Really? Why? There are good reasons.

Hello, after a long break I am back. Recently my wife came to me for a quick brainstorm to submit Jira tickets via a google form. Why? well, I asked her the same thing. She told me that it was easy to create a form, it will alleviate some costs

Technical

Smoke Test your API with Postman API, Newman and GitHub actions.

I usually do smoke testing on my APIs when I deploy them. When using Azure and regular Web Apps or Functions, there is something called slots. Slots are useful when you do a deployment slot, perform basic smoke testing and if it is successful, you just switch the slot to

c#

Generate your own QR Codes with a minimal API

This is going to be a short but important post. QR Codes are used everywhere but oddly enough explaining how are generated is not well known. QR Codes are made up of modules; a module stores data in rows and columns. Usually, QR codes are version 2 with 25 rows

Validate your Records, Settings, DTOs and whatever else you can think with Fluent Validation.

Ahhh validation of properties and values, I think nobody like to do this work, but it is super important when transferring, reading, deserializing data. In this post I will show you that using Fluent Validation it is great for this purpose. But first let us begin with some of the

Duende (Identity Server), Certificates and Postman. What could go wrong? Signed JWT Requests the "easy" way. Part 03

Welcome to the last post of the series, and this will be involving a little bit of azure, some architecture design and of course C#. We will be doing this post backwards, I will show you first how to set up Azure Key Vault, setup visual studio, use the library,