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ERIC PIERCE

Data Science, Projects, Travel and More

Moving to Mastodon

March 2024 Note: BirdsiteLive no longer functions, but a fork called bird.makeup does (for now). The official bird.makeup repo at sr.ht doesn’t appear to work on instances not hosted by the developer, but a fork on github does. Check out my relevant docker-compose file to see the latest updates I’ve made Why Mastodon As part of my self-hosting journey, I shut down essentially all my social media in 2019 with the exception of my LinkedIn, Spotify, and a twitter account which I used to follow but not to post.

Placing Select Docker Containers Behind a VPN

Who Needs A VPN? Docker enables containers to quickly be spun up and used anywhere, but one of the risks many self-hosters take is exposing sensitive services to the open web. There is a balance between safety and convenience with each application exposed, but there are some applications which have no need to be publicly accessible. These typically include administrative applications such as: Portainer PGAdmin (Postgres) phpMyAdmin (Mariadb) Redis Commander Any other service you don’t want exposed One way to keep these services running but prevent them from being exposed is to place them behind a secure VPN.

Compiling Nextcloud for Apple Silicon

My 2016 MacBook Pro has really been showing its age, and the butterfly keyboard has been increasingly tough to type on, so I’ve been in the market for a replacement. While I don’t love the closed source approach Apple is taking with their Apple Silicon ARM64 Chips, their recent MacBook Pro lineup sets a totally new standard for power in a notebook. I got my order in for the M1 Max, which is my first ARM64 based notebook, and started migrating over to it.

Mask Detection With Computer Vision

Overview Mask wearing is a simple and powerful way to combat COVID, but it is most effective when practiced at scale within populations. Unfortunately mask wearing has become politicized in the United States, and businesses are often in the position of policing and enforcing mask wearing themselves. Enter the COVID Bouncer - an application which can be used to detect mask wearing without needing to put a real person at risk of exposure.

Building a Personal Cloud

Like many others, I have numerous services which I use frequently for work, fun, productivity, and more. While using third party services is the easiest and fastest way to fulfill a need, it is far from the most privacy friendly, or depending on your view the most secure. I decided that I wanted to change that, and in 2019 I began to replace third party hosted services with services I can host on a personal Virtual Private Server, and have complete control of the data.