Automation

When I set up my home lab with a Synology DS420j NAS, I wanted a project that would let me explore Claude’s API capabilities in a practical, everyday context. The result is a Python pipeline that takes photos from my NAS, hands them to Claude, and automatically generates and publishes a fully formatted blog post to my Hugo static site on GitHub. Here’s how I built it. The Hardware The foundation of this project is straightforward: a Synology DS420j — a 4-bay NAS — connected to a home router via a network switch. The NAS serves as the central storage layer, holding photos in a dedicated shared folder (blog/photos/latest/) that the pipeline reads from. The DS420j runs Synology’s DSM operating system and is accessible at a reserved local IP address, which makes it a reliable and addressable part of the home network. ...

I’ve recently started using Claude — specifically the Claude Code CLI — and it’s already changed how I manage this blog. Instead of manually writing posts and running git commands, I can now just describe what I want and Claude handles the rest: writing the post, building the site, committing, and pushing to GitHub. It’s pretty wild. To get started I picked up a Claude Pro subscription, which is required to use Claude Code — the free tier doesn’t include it. Totally worth it. Here’s how to get it set up on a MacBook Air. ...

In this post: What is Ansible Installing Ansible Authentication Inventories Playbooks Testing Ansible What is Ansible? Ansible is an open-source infrastructure as code tool provided by Red Hat. Instead of agents, Ansible relies on SSH to pass tasks defined in YAML to remote machines. To get familiar with Ansible, I created a simple scenario where a bash script needed to be uploaded to a remote machine and ran periodically. ...

In this post: Intro JSON File CSV File Python Script Writing the Python Script I was recently tasked with automating the replacement of key:value pairs in a JSON file. The goal was to take the output of a CLI command listing key:value pairs and place those keys/values in specific places within a JSON file. I decided to convert the output of the CLI command to a CSV file and have a python script use that CSV to create a new JSON file with updated keys/values. ...