Okay, so you won't know this, but this is literally the second attempt to recording this
fucking podcast episode this morning.
I have no idea what happened.
I was over at my other recording desk, the one that I actually run the radio station
off of, WRTO.fm, and I mean, I've been recording perfectly fine.
I've done a lot of this. I've done a lot of this. I've done a lot of
calling number, and you can text it. I'll get into that in a bit, but I have no idea what
happened. I mean, I thought I was copying over what I had recorded, spent about 40 minutes
recording it, and I go to start editing it, and I'm like, wait a minute, this is from last
week. This is a Morning Drip episode, and even though it was just happily showing me that it
. I was recording, it was recording, it was a recording, it was a
1122 days of alcohol retirement. Around May 27th, I celebrated my three-year soberversary,
and I had thought about trying to put something together and record around that time, but I just
didn't. Life got in the way, etc., etc., etc. So there's that, and I'll try to condense this
episode a little bit better than the first attempt. I've been working on a lot of coding
projects with Cloud Code and recently using OpenAI's codecs, and I'll be the first to tell you,
because I joke with my son, Tyler, and his older brother, Devin, that I am a toddler with a hand
grenade when it comes to this kind of stuff, because I am not a software developer. I'm not a software
engineer. I have mentioned this before. The last time I dabbled in any real software,
quote, real in air quotes, was back in Visual Basic when I wrote a work order program for back
when I was working at CityNet, and I just needed something that would streamline the process instead
of those damn forms that we were using. So what really got me started on using the Cloud Code was,
I've got this one client. They make forklifts, and one day we were actually talking about something
else, and the CEO of the company, who's a friend of mine, sent me a picture of this form that the
dealers use for filling out to get compensated for warranty repairs, because this company, they sell
the forklifts to the dealer, and the dealer, of course, handles the transaction, selling it to the
incline, that kind of thing. And I thought, well, shit, this will be a great opportunity to see how
well this thing can actually do something like this. So I believe that was a Thursday morning. By that
Thursday afternoon, about four o'clock, I called him and I got him to take a look at it. So anyway,
we've been working on that. It'll allow the dealers to register themselves so they can go in and
actually complete the warranty registration. They can submit warranty claims if they need to.
There's also an area where certain forklift models will have manuals that only dealers can get access
to, you know, that type of thing. So it may be the first project that I actually use clog code for that
I'll get paid for because the owner understands that I'm, I put this together to make their lives easier
and they're not getting it for free. Some pet projects. I love bulletin board systems. We used to
run a, it was a company I worked for back in the nineties, Colony Telephone. They were a
Radio Shack franchise, uh, dealer. Uh, the owner of the company was a been with AT&T for 23 years,
maintaining microwave, uh, microwave towers. Matter of fact, the automated beacon that is on these
towers that are above 200 feet so that airplanes and what have you can see those. He developed that.
He just didn't keep the patent up, which I always told him when he told me that story, I should,
somebody should have kicked him in the ass. Anyway, around 93 or 94, we decided that we,
we were late to the game. We, we shouldn't have done this, but we ran our own, we started our own
bulletin board system right there in good old Fitzgerald, Georgia. It was two lines and it was
called Peach Online. And I literally was running wildcat bulletin board software in DOS, uh, boxes under
OS 2 and it worked great. We also had a six disc Pioneer, uh, CD changer that was, had a shit ton of
shareware. Cause that's the thing you did is you downloaded a bunch of shareware off of bulletin boards.
We also did echo mail and internet mail. Uh, we had an automated process where every night at midnight,
it would call up and send out all of them, all of the, you got to keep in mind, this was real time
email for bulletin boards. Wasn't really a thing at that point. And so it would send out all the email
to go into the, to internet email and echo mail and all of that. And we had a satellite dish
that every night would also pull down all of the incoming mail and what was called bag files. It was dot B-A-G.
And then the wildcat system had an automated process where it would take that and break it apart and put
it on all the various, uh, discussion groups and echo mail and that kind of thing. So we ran that
probably for about six months or so. And then of course the internet basically killed most bulletin boards
at the time. But, uh, I was like, you know what, can I, can I make a BBS emulator that kind of looks
like wildcat? And the short answer was yes, it's over at bbs.anero.com. Funny thing though, is my
wife and my daughter were going through our massive, uh, CD collection the other day and actually came
across, I still have it, wildcat five for windows 95 and windows NT, the disc with the key in the
registration code for a 16 line count. And also in this thing is something called project annihilator,
which was the first true 32 bit client server BBS. Uh, they were, they were doing their damnedest.
I think the wildcat five got renamed to the, the net server platform. They were doing their damnedest to
compete, uh, with the internet, tried to, I guess, integrate with the internet, kind of like what AOL
did there for a while. They eventually went out of business and somebody at some other company,
it starts with an S I can never remember actually owns the license for the wildcat stuff. But so what
I'm trying to do now is since I have the bonafide thing, I found a copy of windows 95, uh, rather
98 SE second edition, got it running, um, running in some, it's under proxmox. I run everything under
proxmox and, uh, trying to get the networking situated because what I want to do is I want to run
this and instead of having Claude make this BBS, uh, uh, emulator, which I essentially have done,
I, I want it just to be a front end that actually uses Xterm or whatever to actually come in and hit
the true wildcat server. So, you know, I'll keep you updated on whether I get that project working
or not. And so, um, yeah, because you know, we had gotten to the point with BBSs. So if you dialed
into a bulletin board system, you had to have some communication software, like procom plus Q
modem, something like that. And, uh, right there at the end, because all the bulletin boards were
basically, they were just text or they were antsy texts where you actually would get color and things
of that nature. But then they started implementing this thing called rip, rip graphics and bulletin
board software started supporting it. And then of course, your client had to support it because what it
would do is it would send directions, um, basically code, if you will, to your client software that would
then paint the screen. So you'd get these nice, nice buttons that you could press with a mouse or you
could move, you know, tab over and stuff like that. And so you had to have a rip graphics enabled BBS
software and you'd have to have rip graphics, uh, enabled client. And I think Q modem did support that
right there at the end. Procom plus may have eventually, but, but then the internet came in
and basically cut all of that. There's still some bulletin boards out there that actually take calls
over the phone lines. But if you do a search for wildcat, you will find listings for active wildcat
installations, but you connect to them via telnet because it did support that. A few other things I've
been working on, um, I did a podcast membership and hosting platform called Podscope. You want to check
it out. It's over at podscope.cc. I'm actually using it at tiftonmediaworks.com. I developed a document
management system because I didn't like what was available out there. I think there's one called
paperless GX or GL or something like that. Probably great, um, a great project. It was just
way too out of scope. Funny for what I'm about to tell you, this project's called, but what I needed,
uh, because all my documents are stored on shares on my Synology NAS on my internal network. And so I just
needed something that could monitor those, um, put it into a database and, you know, basically make it
searchable. So I created a project called scope and that's what it does. It runs in a privileged LXE
container because of SMB issues for unprivileged LXE containers. And it monitors two shares that I have
on my NAS. And as soon as it detects new documents, whether it's PDFs or whether it's, um, graphics files,
it takes it, it OCRs it, and then it shoots it over to another container that I've got running Ollama
where it's using one of the models to take the OCR text, summarize it, and then suggest tags and then
stores it. And then I can, you know, I can see it in a listing. I can bring it up. I can, honestly,
I can download it if I want to, but I mean, it's already on my server. And so that's worked really
great. I think that one's publicly available. Uh, I have a Git repository that I run at
get.knowthenerds.com. So any of my public projects are there. So you can, you can check them out and
see what's available. I redid my radio station with Cloud Code. I basically said, Hey, look, uh,
redesign this thing and let's create some cool player widgets and integrate some weather and all of that.
So go check that out at wrto.fm. I actually have a couple of containers. Uh, one is a watchdog that
that watches to see if radio DJ, which is a free play out software I use has stopped playing. And if
so, it will try to fire it off using API code, uh, calls to start it back up. Uh, there's another one
that as I add new music, it scans the file and tries to write the cue markers for the intros.
Uh, and the big one, the big one I'm working on is called core. It's an MSP dashboard. I currently use,
uh, uh, and the MSP services of a company called enable.
And so my friend Ben started working on his own platform and I was like, well, let me, let me, me to me.
Okay. And so I call mine core. And honestly, I, I love what it's been able to do so far.
Uh, we have this, we use this methodology where he calls his sentinels. I call mine centuries,
but they're, they're little nodes, if you will, whether it's, uh, in a Docker container, which I
recently got working or an LXE container or a dedicated PC, whether that's just like an old
throwaway PC that won't run windows 11, but it's, it's a Linux based software that checks in with the
dashboard. My century checks into core using cloud flare tunnels. And this, and whenever I need to
create a new century, like I add a new client, I create a century. It creates the tokens and
everything so that the century can be deployed and connect securely back to core over cloud
flares tunneling network. I also can deploy a piece of software called scout, which runs in
the tray. That, uh, is how I pull telemetry. I've integrated my, my rust desk relay server to be able
to basically go to an endpoint in core, tell it, I want to connect via rust desk and can get right into
the machine and assess the client. And, uh, I can image a PC using WIM limit, uh, lib X, I think is
what it's called anyway, with a Dism fallback. And then I can have it create, uh, an ISO so that I can
throw that in Hyper-V or Proxmox and get a machine back up and going if I need to, or if I just need to
take it and, you know, image it to, uh, uh, another drive and then throw it in the machine. Maybe the,
you know, the drive started dying on us or something and we caught it in time. A lot of functionality,
a lot of functionality, been doing a lot. My brain's on fire with all kinds of crap that we
can do. I've got two projects in the pipeline. One I've started working on, uh, I use 3CX as a phone
server for my client and for myself, but a conversation with my friend Ben the other day made me think,
well, hell, can I build using asterisk as the, as the foundation, my own 3CX like package?
And the answer is yes. So I have it designed. And what I've started doing is because Opus is smarter
when it comes to Claude, but it does burn up more tokens. I have Opus do the design specifically so
that Sonnet can build it. Then I have Sonnet build it. Then I have Opus do a final code review for
security vulnerabilities and, and basically just shit that doesn't work right. And here lately,
I've started using open AI as codecs to go behind Claude and do a review. And then I have Claude
Opus review codecs, review and requirements and see if it agrees and then do the fixes and what have
you. So I feel like, because my son Tyler is big thing is he's not anti AI, but even in his line of
work, he's, he's realizing that again, toddler with a hand grenade, there are some junior developers out
there that are just blindly following what the AI tells them. And you know, it's, it's a trust,
but verify. And in this situation, it's a trust, but verify, verify, verify. And so that's what I've,
I've started doing. And, um, I'm sure there's other little projects that I'm, cause every time I come up
with an idea, I'm like, Ooh, let me scope that out and start working on a project. I've got one right
now that I started yesterday. We're in like phase four, uh, out of eight. Uh, I use FreshBooks at
freshbooks.com to do all the billing for my clients. Uh, I can do, you know, I can do manually generated
invoices. I can do automated invoices for people that are under contract. Um, it can do auto pay and
stuff like that. But when I started out with them years ago, it was $25 and now it's $38 a month.
And so I was like, can I build my own? Because I already use Stripe, you know, with FreshBooks,
I have my own Stripe account, Tifton Media Works, that management platform where, you know, I drop,
I drop episodes of the morning drip that I do, uh, for free for seven days. And then it goes behind
to paywall. All of that membership architecture connects with a company that I have one, one of
a couple of companies I have with Stripe. So I was like, let me see. Am I, do I expect to get away
from FreshBooks in the next couple of weeks? Oh, hell no. This is a proof of concept. What can I build?
And let's figure out what functionality that FreshBooks actually has that this doesn't have,
and that I can't duplicate, you know, that kind of thing. I'm, I don't think there's too much that I
can't duplicate, especially with the fact that I'm not storing credit cards, but Stripe handles all of
that. The only thing I have in question is I currently can do ACH, which only costs me a percent
of the total with FreshBooks. I don't know if Stripe can do that or if I have to set up an account
with Plaid or something like that. I don't know. We'll get there. We'll figure it out. But I'm having
a lot of fun with this stuff. And it's also helping me diagnose some issues with clients.
Yeah. AI is here to stay. That's all I can say. Should we blindly follow it and run into the ditch
when it, when it basically is going to drive us there? I mean, no, but we got it. I'm using it to
boost what I can do in my job, in my company, but I'm not using it to replace anybody because,
well, there's only me. So if AI can replace me, I mean, that's great. If I could still make money
and not have to worry about it. And every time a client had a problem, they just talk to the AI,
not even realizing they're talking to the AI and it could solve their problem and they're happy,
then I'd be happy. But we're not there yet. I know that's where my friend Ben is trying to head,
but I'm not sure. I still like to have my hands into it because I don't want to lose the knowledge
that I've gained over the last 35 years of being in technology. So anyway, yeah, I think that gets you
kind of caught up on that aspect of it. As I'm recording this, today is the 22nd of June. Yesterday
was father's day and, um, okay. It was, it was, it was a, it was a day. It was okay. Yeah. I've got
three kids, but my youngest, my daughter is 29. So, uh, she did something for me like she does for,
for me and for her mom, uh, every year. Um, she made me some red velvet sandwich cookies. Now you may
be asking yourself, what is a red velvet sandwich cookie? So a few years ago, my daughter came across
this recipe. And so she essentially takes cake mix, but I think she reduces the amount of liquid
that goes in it. And so instead of it churning out a cake texture, it turns out something that's in
between cake and cookie. So it's not like tears apart, like cake does, but it doesn't, it's not
like stiff and crunchy. Like some cookies are, it kind of melts in your mouth. And so she takes
that, makes it out of red velvet cake mix and then takes buttercream icing and sandwiches that
between the two halves. So you have red velvet, uh, cookies or sandwich cookies and they are fucking
awesome, man. Fucking awesome. So she made those Friday and yesterday for lunch, my wife was going
to do these, um, Philly cheesesteak meatballs, but we wound up buying the wrong vegetable mix for that.
And it really, it seemed to upset her. And I told her, I said, honey, don't worry about it.
You know, next weekend, if you want to do it, that's great. Just because it's Father's Day,
no big deal. What's our, what's our plan B? So we wound up having chili. And then we watched, uh,
the Super Mario Galaxy movie, which it was, it was good to me. It's not as good as the first movie,
but it was good. And then we watched, uh, alien Romulus. So if you're, if you like alien,
the alien franchise and alien movies, it was pretty good. It was pretty good. I, I enjoyed it.
Not, it's not the type of movie my wife likes, but she sat there and watched it with us too. So that
was my, that was my Father's Day. I, you know, the Mother's Day and the Father's Day things,
I, you know, we, we don't go crazy over that. Um, it's just another day. Okay. Thank you. I
appreciate it. You, you wish me happy Father's Day. Um, the cookies are nice and, and I enjoyed the day,
but I don't expect any kind of special treatment or anything like that. So, I mean, that's kind of
the way I feel on my birthday. You know, I didn't have anything to do with the, of the fact that I was
born. It just was, you know, so if you're a father, I hope you, uh, hope you had a great
Father's Day yesterday. And I think since this is my second attempt and I'm not going to be able to
cover everything that I did in the first attempt. And I know this one's going to be shorter than the
first attempt. I'm going to bid you adieu. If you are on a sobriety journey, I wish you well. I hope
you're doing great. Um, yeah, cause it's a journey. You know, I know, can't believe I've made it
three years. First time ever. And I'm just going to keep going, keep moving on. Uh, if you want to
reach out, uh, have any questions, comments, or concerns, uh, the email address is podcast
at bookofdonovan.com. Again, that's podcast at bookofdonovan.com. So in case it's probably another
month from now, um, I hope you have a fantastic 4th of July because I probably won't drop something for
this podcast, uh, before then, who knows? It might not even be in July. If I don't have anything to say,
there's no reason to, you know, waste your time, right? Anyway, I hope you're doing well. Take care
of yourselves and we'll talk soon. Bye-bye. This has been a production of Tifton Media Works.
Check out all our podcasts by visiting tiftonmediaworks.com.