System Saviour is the personal website of Adam Bolte. Thanks for visiting. The purpose of this website is to provide a channel for all of my ramblings (mostly tech-related, but not always). I also have a few random files and projects hosted here, but I don’t update much here as frequently as I should. The one exception is the Finished Games page which I am quite strict about maintaining. I find it very helpful to be able to see a list of which games I have played, how many games I have played in a given year, the versions of games that I played, and how long ago it was that I played them.
Why System Saviour?
I have many computers. Most of these were obtained at no cost from people who had no desire to keep them, as they are considered to be past the used-by date. The name of this blog was thought up in part because of something a friend said to me once: “I hope you recycle all your hardware when you throw it out”. That had me thinking… I could not recall ever throwing a computer out! Thanks to free software, the hardware requirements imposed by Microsoft to run a modern operating system are not applicable. Hardware that would normally be disposed of simply because “it’s too old” can continue to serve a purpose.
How is it hosted?
This website, along with a number of other web services, is hosted on a Raspberry Pi using my home Internet connection. The uptime may not be amazing, but it’s good enough for my personal blog. I could more easily use Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages, but I prefer not to be bogged down by the limitations of PaaS where it is unnecessary. I never have to concern myself with a provider changing their terms of service, their privacy policy, or cancelling the free tier of service (hello Heroku!). If I have a few additional hours of downtime per year, or if performance seems a little slower, so be it — I’m completely fine with that for this use case.
Interests
My main interests outside of my work include free software, learning 日本語 (Japanese), running (and the occasional Parkrun) and playing video games. Expect these topics to come up a lot here.
My Raspberry Pi and CuBox computers all run on flavours of Debian GNU/Linux. I primarily use Arch on my main desktop computer, and my main laptop runs NixOS. My living room gaming desktop runs SteamOS (installed using the Steam Deck recovery image).
You may find my GnuPG key here. Fingerprint: 2626 8B66 72ED 7DD8 5ED8 56F3 F51B 7834 F92D 586B
Articles
In the past I have written articles for SitePoint. A list of those should be available here.
Things I’ve built (that I can share)
- abs — ABS Backup System using Bash, rsync over SSH, hard-links and cron.
- amifinder — Locate the most recently created AMI in an AWS account matching a given filter.
- aws-mfa-env — Export AWS session credentials as environment variables using a MFA token.
- envswitch — Quickly export different sets of environment variables into a local interactive shell.
- wordle-solver — Solve Wordle puzzles. Everyone has written one of these.
Other work:
- cookiecutter-python-project maintainer.
- Assorted fixes to the Salt Stack project.
- Bug reports and testing at WineHQ.
Work
Throughout my career I have worked in both small startups and big multinational companies. I have worked with both physical servers and also with IaaS. I have made extensive use of configuration management, with Salt Stack being my preference. I am also very comfortable with Python, having used it extensively for all manner of systems administration tasks (such as implementing Lambda and Lambda@Edge functions, custom Salt state and execution modules, Docker tooling, and configuring Buildbot, to name but a few examples).