Crazy that the last post is already more than two months ago. What have I been doing in the meantime? The usual.
OpenClaw
I spent quite a while stuck in the AI agent rabbit hole. After resisting it for a long time, I finally took a look at OpenClaw in early May.
And what can I say: I got lost in it pretty quickly. I created my personal assistant Nia and kept integrating her further into my everyday life. With history and access to my own tools, it really is a big step up from regular chatbots.
nia-todo
One evening I once again had no idea what I actually wanted to get done. So I opened my to-do app Todoist and tried to sort out my thoughts.
That was when I had the idea that, with the current vibe-coding possibilities, replacing Todoist with something of my own should be relatively easy. So I simply asked Nia to build me a web-based to-do app.
A few minutes later I got a link and landed on the web interface of a small, simple to-do app. She had named it nia-todo.
It was a nice-looking interface where you could create different to-dos and assign priorities and deadlines.
My girlfriend had also wanted an app for quite a while where we could manage shared to-dos, shopping lists, and similar things. So over the following days I started adding a few features to the web app. I added responsive support for mobile devices and turned it into a PWA (Progressive Web App) with offline mode.
But that was not enough for me and apparently I had no idea what to do with all my free time 🤡, so over the next few weeks I added more features and published the whole project on GitHub for self-hosting.
The name nia-todo stayed, but the app has been completely reworked by now. Of course it is still a vibe-coding project, but one that has taken quite a bit of my time at this point.
The feature list of the current version 2.12.2 has become fairly long by now:
- Recurring tasks with daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly intervals
- Projects and subprojects
- Sections for splitting up projects
- Project sharing between users
- Workspaces with separate projects, for example private and work
- Reminders, push notifications, and location-based reminders on Android
- BrainDump: speech-to-text followed by LLM-based conversion into to-dos
- Admin panel for server management
- User management
- Email integration for invitations and password resets
- Authentication, API keys, and CSRF protection
- 2FA/MFA via TOTP, passkey, and email code
- OIDC support
- Offline-capable PWA with local IndexedDB
- Android app
- Windows desktop app
- i18n, currently German and English
- SQLite as the database
nia-todo is available as a Docker image and as a Debian package for server installation.
With the BrainDump feature, I finally replaced Todoist for good and canceled my Pro subscription. I use Whisper for STT and a minimal OpenClaw agent that turns the prompt into to-dos and sorts them into existing projects.
I am currently working on version 3.0, which will bring a redesigned UI, attachments, comments, and subtasks.
Pocket ID and Tinyauth
Until now, every service in my homelab had its own users because I was always too lazy to set up OIDC or SSO properly. But since I wanted to add OIDC support to nia-todo, I finally had to deal with it so I could actually test the feature properly.
So: no more excuses.
Authelia, Authentik, and Keycloak all feel a bit too bloated for my use case. So I went with Pocket ID.
The special thing about Pocket ID is that it only supports passkeys for authentication. No usernames, no passwords.
Once it was set up, connecting most services with native OIDC support was very straightforward. For services without OIDC support, I use Tinyauth as an OIDC proxy.
Since NPMplus supports Tinyauth directly as an auth proxy, the integration there was just as simple.
After one evening, my entire homelab had been moved to SSO, and I am asking myself why I did not do this much earlier 😅
Gothic 1 Remake
On June 5, the Gothic 1 Remake was also released. A remake of one of the first open-world games I fell in love with as a kid.
So I spent pretty much all of June back in the Valley of Mines, exploring everything again from start to finish.
The developers at Alkimia Interactive absolutely nailed the remake. I enjoyed every single second of it.
The last time I got this lost in a game was probably The Witcher 3.
What’s next?
That was my last two months. Maybe I will introduce nia-todo in more detail after the release of version 3.0. Maybe I will finally write the promised follow-up post about CrowdSec.