Fresh/Brewed

OS Chatbots with n8n and Ollama in GCP

A Chatbot you can control using n8n workflows

I’ve given talks before about n8n and chatbots. I’ve been using n8n for years now and have had a few articles about it. But in almost all cases, I’m running n8n locally in Docker or my local Kubernetes. How hard would it be to pivot to using Cloud Compute? Could we run n8n in Cloud Run, especially as there are now persistent Cloud Run instances? What about GCP Cloud Compute? Could we even run some small LLM models in Ollama without the GPU tax? How would that compare with Gemini API keys or an SA that uses Agent Platform?

OS Harnesses: OpenCode

Goal Mode and Model Updates

I dance between Harnesses, I do. I like the big players like Copilot, Claude and Antigravity CLI, but really the up and comers are the ones that catch my attention. I lasted spoke on OpenCode in August of 2025. While I noted it was from sst.dev I didn’t really dig into what SST was (or why one would use it). At that time, I was comparing OpenCode to OllamaCode and Qwen3 Coder Plus (along with the much loved and now defunct Gemini CLI).

OS IaC: Pyinfra

A Python-based IaC

Recently I gave an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) talk on Open-Source tooling and focused on Ansible and OpenTofu. One of the participants asked me about Pyinfra which I had never heard of before. Pyinfra is fully MIT licensed and seems rather full featured. Today we will get it setup locally, create some basic “deploys” (their word for playbooks), then look at remote deploys before showing how we can create scheduled YAML based pipelines to launch and manage infrastructure with Pyinfra.

Hallmark Skill

A UI skill, not a cheesy rom com

I saw this new Hallmark design skill that usehallmark.com put out. It exposes roughly 50 different themes from Editorial to Modern minimal, Atmospheric to Playful. It’s made by a couple of guys, Hassan El Mghari and Youssef El Mghari which I assume are relatives (but have no confirmation). They build very cool Open-Source and AI driven sites such as RoomGPT.io and self.so and this very cool AI Papers site, 1kpapers.comm. Let’s check out their skill, which despite the graphic, really has nothing to do with the Greeting card company (which is now more known for cheesy romantic movies).

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