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John Bowdre

Documenting my miscellaneous scripts, one-liners, and small technical projects primarily for my own reference - but maybe you'll find my notes useful as well.

Auto-connect to ProtonVPN on untrusted WiFi with Tasker

Nov 24, 2020 15 min read

I recently shared how I use Tasker and Home Assistant to keep my phone from charging past 80%. Today, I'm going to share the setup I use to automatically connect my phone to a VPN on networks I don't control. Background The apps OpenVPN config file...

Safeguard your Android's battery with Tasker + Home Assistant

Nov 14, 2020 4 min read

A few months ago, I started using the Accubattery app to keep a closer eye on how I'd been charging my phones. The app has a handy feature that notifies you once the battery level reaches a certain threshold so you can pull the phone off the charger ...

Showdown: Lenovo Chromebook Duet vs. Google Pixel Slate

Nov 6, 2020 6 min read

Okay, okay, this isn't actually going to be a comparison review between the two wildly-mismatched-but-also-kind-of-similar Chromeblets, but rather a (hopefully) brief summary of my experience moving from an $800 Pixel Slate + $200 Google keyboard to ...

Setting up Linux on a new Lenovo Chromebook Duet (bonus arm64 complications!)

Oct 28, 2020 8 min read

I've written in the past about the Linux setup I've been using on my Pixel Slate. My Slate's keyboard stopped working over the weekend, though, and there don't seem to be any replacements (either Google or Brydge) to be found. And then I saw that Wal...

Fixing WSL2 connectivity when connected to a VPN with wsl-vpnkit

Oct 7, 2020 2 min read

I was pretty excited to get WSL2 and Docker working on my Windows 10 1909 laptop a few weeks ago, but I quickly encountered a problem: WSL2 had no network connectivity when connected to my work VPN. Well, that's not entirely true; Docker worked just...

Abusing Chrome's Custom Search Engines for Fun and Profit

Sep 24, 2020 3 min read

Do you (like me) find yourself frequently searching for information within the same websites over and over? Wouldn't it be great if you could just type your query into your browser's address bar (AKA the Chrome Omnibox) and go straight to the results...