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Hello There 👨💻
Welcome to my blog!
I am a Systems Administrator, living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
While I do believe AI (referring to LLMs as that is what everyone means 99% of the time when they say “AI” now) has some use in the world, I consider myself an AI Vegetarian ; meaning I do not attempt to use AI in everything I do. For example, this blog is 100% written by me (a human) without the use of AI. In a world where LinkedIn is now flooded with AI generated garbage , I pride myself on adding some human text to the internet. Will it be gobbled up by AI bots and spit out at the top of Google? Maybe. But it makes me happy to write these blogs. If 1 person finds them useful, I have succeeded.
I work with “AI” plenty at work. I choose to retain a chunk of my humanity and limit my use of it in my day-to-day life. If you contact me expect a human to reply with something that is not sloppypasta .
Cheers!
Entra Retires Microsoft-provided SMS and Voice MFA
The decision to stop native support for SMS/Phone 2FA for Entra has come.
Intro to Actual Budget
Actual Budget is a free budgeting software that supports envelope and tracking budget methods.
Microsoft Edge Sidebar Extension Allowlisting
Allowing Microsoft Edge Sidebar extensions when implementing a browser extension allowlist in Group Policy
Using Yubikey 5 for SSH Key Storage and Authentication
How to use a Yubikey Series 5 key to create and store an SSH private key for authentication.
iOS Device Showing Read-Only on Read-Write Samba Share
When accessing a Samba share on an iOS device, the directories load as read-only despite the user having read and write access to the directory. A simple config line in smb.conf fixes the issue.
Proxying Immich
Using Pangolin as a reverse proxy to access Immich from outside a private network.
GNOME Power Daemon Bug Blacks Screen After 30 Seconds
Symptoms
As of March 2026 (time of writing), a bug has existed in GNOME for a few years that causes the display to go black after 30 seconds of inactivity (not suspended or locked, just goes dark). This behavior has been consistent when using OpenSUSE Leap 15.x and 16.x connected to an external display. When resuming from sleep, the screen will go black after just 30 seconds of inactivity regardless of the configured power settings. A system reboot resolves the issue until the next time the system resumes from sleep/suspend.