Coding Notions

The Art of Crafting Effective AI Prompts

Is AI really underperforming, or are we not communicating our requests effectively? In the age of artificial intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) like Claude and GPT have become indispensable tools for businesses and individuals alike. They assist with everything from drafting emails to generating complex reports. Yet, a common frustration

Automated Backup with Rclone and a systemd Timer

There are many options for creating backups. Some solutions have extensive user interfaces or features such as encryption, compression, deduplication and block level incremental backup. A nice open source example of this is Duplicati. I chose a simple setup with Rclone because it fits my needs well. Rclone can synchronize

Caching Everything on Cloudflare and Automating Purge

Websites often have content that rarely changes. Cloudflare offers a free service that hosts your content on 200+ servers around the world. As content changes, the cached copies are invalidated and fetched from the origin server. In this way, a website can handle millions of requests at high speed with

Creating a Smart Air Quality Sensor

The west coast fires of September 2020 produced massive amounts of smoke and air pollution rose to dangerous levels. I stumbled upon the PurpleAir PA-II air quality sensor which was providing much of the state-wide air quality data. Internally it uses a PMS5003 and I picked one up for $20