Fresh/Brewed

OS Apps: Antimatter

Some fun with OS Mattermost

I last looked at the OS version of Mattermost back in 2024 and over time people wanted a more open-source native fork. Antimatter forked from mattermost back in Sept of this year but is very active with 1338 commits since forking as of writing. Let’s see what is new by firing this up locally with a local build… Antimatter Let’s clone isaac@isaac-G707:~/Workspaces$ git clone https://github.com/AntimatterChat/antimatter-docker.git Cloning into 'antimatter-docker'... remote: Enumerating objects: 195, done. remote: Counting objects: 100% (195/195), done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (90/90), done. remote: Total 195 (delta 98), reused 178 (delta 81), pack-reused 0 (from 0) Receiving objects: 100% (195/195), 79.34 KiB | 1.53 MiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (98/98), done. isaac@isaac-G707:~/Workspaces$ cd antimatter-docker/ isaac@isaac-G707:~/Workspaces/antimatter-docker$ I tried local builds by cloning various Antimatter repos but high a roadblock with metrics

OS Apps: GCP Custom UI, Ripasso and PixelTools

A fun mixed bag of goodness

Today we’ll look at a few interesting apps that have been on my list: GCP Custom UI, Ripasso password manager and PixelTools. The first two are open-source but the last is a free to use SaaS suite based on Open-Source frameworks so I’m including it. Let’s start with the powerful GCP Custom UI written by a fellow GDE Aliane Abdelouahab GCP Custom UI Aliane in the GDE community has been busy working on this “gcp-custom-ui” app for some time. They would get excited and post updates and even take feature requests. I decided it had grown big enough it was worth a deep dive just on its own.

IaC Cleanup and Cloud Cost Optimizing

Let's save some money

In my recent IaCConf talk, I showed some demos from this IacConf2026demo repo. One launched to Azure as an Azure function using Tofu, and the other used AWX with a playbook to launch another container to GCP. However, leaving these running all the time will really mount costs. In both GCP And in Azure Cleanup with Tofu In IaCConf talk I demonstrated using tofu plan and tofu apply to create the infrastructure.

AI Skills with Cloudflare+Ngrok Tunnels

I might have spent too much time on the demo...

In my last article I spoke on CLoudflare tunnels as well as Ngrok ones. As we were wrapping that, I found a clean approach to just adding a sidecar to a Kubernetes pod to create tunnels on the fly. I was using a Wilderness app demo to do that but thought it might be something I would want to do again (and of course share with others) Creating an AI Skill Using Antigravity with Argon 4, I started by getting on the right branch and asking it to make a Skill for the helm chart:

Cloudflare and Ngrok Tunnels

How is this any different than ngrok?

I recently came across this Cloudflare blog article on Quick Tunnels. They seem like lightweight ngrok tunnels, but without needing any auth. The article suggested they were great to use with agentic flows, but I have a hard time these are things we get just for free - no account required. We’ll look into Cloudflared Tunnels on the CLI, how we might set them up in Kubernetes then compare these things to what Ngrok has to offer.