I have been using the following techniques to deploy my (this) website automatically from GitHub to Cloudflare Pages for a few years now. The best part is that you can have all this for free; of course, you still need to pay for a domain, nothing is 100% free in life, right?

Before we start, I’d like to clarify that this will not be a step-by-step guide on creating a pipeline to deploy your website. Instead, I will list the tools I use and explain how they work together to host and deliver the website with impressive speeds in a serverless manner.

While using Ansible to automate the system updates on my personal servers, I ran into an issue where the apt module randomly failed with the error:

FAILED! => {"ansible_facts": {"discovered_interpreter_python": "/usr/bin/python3"}, "changed": false, "msg": "Failed to lock apt for exclusive operation: Failed to lock directory /var/lib/apt/lists/: E:Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock."}

Apparently it has something to do with the Unattended Upgrades service. Since this is something I want to keep enabled, the workaround is to set some retries on the task that uses the apt module. Here is an example:

I don’t think everyone, but at least a lot of people have a set of dotfiles that they use to configure their environment on a personal or work machine. Many people have those dotfiles in a git repository to keep them versioned and synced between machines.

But not many people make use of a bootstrap script to install those dotfiles on a new machine. I recently rewrote my Bootstrap script in Python. It is very simple, just creating symlinks from the dotfiles repo to the home directory.

iVPN is a VPN service that I’ve been using to protect my privacy online. I have it configured on my laptop and phone and it’s pretty handy, especially when I’m on public wifi.

But if I want to protect my entire home network? Is it possible to configure a Mikrotik router to use iVPN? Yes, it is!

I will quickly go over the steps you need to take to configure your Mikrotik to use iVPN Wireguard servers.

• “I upgraded to a new Mac M1 chip and now I can’t run Winbox anymore”;
• “I switched from Windows or Linux to the new Macs and I cannot access my Mikrotik router using Winbox anymore”;
• “I’m trying to run the Winbox using wine on my Mac M1 without success”;

If you find yourself in one of these situations, this simple and basic step-by-step may can help you. Since I switched to the not so new M1 chip, I couldn’t run the Winbox using Wine. Everytime getting many different errors.