Doing all of this maintenance on my car recently highlighted that I need a nice worktop/work table. I’ve been using my kid’s play work bench which has been surprisingly useful but it’s also built for a 4 year old. I needed something built for an adult.

A few years back my dad and I bought a couple of Simpson StrongTies workbench kits. We were going to build some workbenches over a weekend but somehow that never came to pass — I think we went golfing instead. Fortunately, my mom still had the kit in her garage and let me have it.

Tools and Supplies

Specs

The belt was squealing on cold/damp mornings. Since I had never replaced it and I am almost at 90k it seemed like a simple thing to tackle. It wasn’t on the dealer’s list. I vaguely remember them mentioning it a while back during an oil change service but I blew it off (because it hadn’t started squealing and I’m sure they quoted me $350).

This is one of the easiest things you can replace. It’s a $30 belt, and to get it off, you just need a 15mm wrench/socket to move the tensioner to put slack on the belt. Then it’s just a matter of routing the belt properly.

The PCV valve wasn’t on the dealership’s list but one of the youtuber’s that I stumbled on while learning how to do all of the maintenance, MrSubaru1387 (https://www.youtube.com/@MrSubaru1387), flagged it as an easy and important item to swap at this mileage. It’s a $15 part and a few minutes of work.

I remember replacing this on my Prelude back in the day.

Here is the pdf guide I made.

This is one of the easiest DIY maintenance things you can do your Subaru. I believe the dealership wanted to charge me $495 to do it. To DIY its about ~$40 in OEM coolant (from the dealership) and $30 in parts/tools. You could probably get by without the special funnel but it makes ‘bleeding’ the system more straightforward.

Like the CVT Fluid change, I did a lot of research and consolidated it into a list of steps then had ChatGPT organize it into a printable procedure PDF.

One of the first ‘big’ maintenance items I decided to tackle as part of my 88k maintenance adventure was the CVT transmission fluid flush. I did tons of research and watched a handful of youtube videos. Its a pretty straightforward process. I wrote up the procedure, as I understood it from all of my research, then had ChatGPT verify it and format it for me and put it into a guide I could follow.

Using open-webui#

I set up a local LLM using ROCm on my desktop in my last post. So I have the LLM running locally, but its pretty clunky and as a paying user of ChatGPT, I want that cleaner UI/UX. Enter open-webui. This is exactly what I was looking for as a front-end for the ollama server I set up.

I decided to go with the Docker setup.

Running ROCm on Pop!#

This has gotten sooo much easier than when I tried to set this up 2 years ago. ROCm has come a long way, but the support and tooling has advanced as well. Now you don’t have to jump through tons of hoops to get AI libraries and software to work with ROCm. The last time I tried this, I needed to add ubuntu repos, edit my /etc/os-release file to pretend I was using ubuntu", and do a rain-dance to get my Raedeon 6900xt in a usable state.

Updating DNS Records#

This was a fairly straightforward process:

1. Log into GitHub > Go to your public repo > Settings > Pages: and enter your domain in the Custom Domain section
2. Add your domain name www.wesgould.com
3. Log into your DNS provider.
   • Delete CNAME / A-RECORDs for www.wesgould.com and wesgould.com to avoid conflicts with the new records.
   • ADD CNAME RECORD for www.wesgould.com.
   • Add A-RECORD for wesgould.com.
4. To create A records, point your apex domain to the IP addresses for GitHub Pages:

   - 185.199.108.153
   - 185.199.109.153
   - 185.199.110.153
   - 185.199.111.153
   

It’s been an…adventure.

Why Switch from Publii to Hugo?#

I am switching from Publii to Hugo because I wanted to take advantage of the text notes I was already taking with Vimwiki for my various projects. The Publii interface was nice, but I’m already writing notes in a format that doesn’t require me to use their WYSIWYG editor. I know that seems lazy, but it’s an extra step that caused just enough friction that I wouldn’t update the blog.