October 2026

The easy way to add Dropbox to a personal script is one refresh token in .env. That works until a second person should send a file to their account rather than yours. Tools Center treats cloud storage as optional egress from a private host. The site owns OAuth application credentials; each user connects their own Dropbox or Google Drive account; the CLI never receives a shared cloud refresh token. The public repository shows the implementation. ...

A private multi-user host still needs MFA. It does not necessarily need Laravel Fortify or an external identity platform. Composer libraries plus careful session state can be enough—if relying-party identity, trusted devices, recovery, and automation exceptions are explicit parts of the design. This post walks through how Tools Center implements TOTP, WebAuthn, and “remember this device” in frameworkless PHP. The source is available as a worked example. For the frontend-facing side of authentication—OIDC, BFFs, HttpOnly cookies, interceptors, and guards—see Modern Auth Patterns for Angular Frontends. ...

Calling yt-dlp from PHP is a few lines of proc_open(). Keeping it useful on a private host is an operations problem: JavaScript challenges need a runtime in the image, authenticated sites need carefully handled cookies, output needs a filesystem boundary, and someone must own the terms-of-service risk of each source. This post describes that operational shape in Tools Center, with public source for reference. It is not a guide to bypassing DRM or site restrictions. The operator decides which sites and content they are entitled to fetch. ...

I run a small private toolkit—Tools Center—where a logged-in user pastes a URL and the host pulls the file, optionally sends it to their own cloud storage, and keeps a history. The interesting engineering problem is not the form. It is how to finish a multi-minute download without Redis, a worker pool, or a second process supervisor. This series is about that class of system: frameworkless PHP on one host. The source is public, but the repository has no license file, so I am linking it as a worked example rather than presenting it as an open-source product. The hosted app remains private. ...

A product can be real, well made, and accurately labeled without being useful for the problem I want to solve. That distinction is easy to lose. A label may emphasize a large dose, a natural source, a proprietary process, or the phrase “clinically studied.” None of those phrases alone establishes that the product improves an outcome that matters to me. This article is the product-level part of the decision process. The first article in this series asks whether an intervention makes sense. The second asks whether the situation calls for monitoring, supportive care, medication, or medical help. Here I assume I have a reason to consider a product and work through what I need to know before using it. ...

When I feel ill, the first decision is not which medicine to take. It is what kind of response the situation warrants. That can mean monitoring at home, using supportive care, taking a medicine for a defined purpose, arranging a routine appointment, seeking prompt medical assessment, or getting emergency help. Those options are not points on a scale from weak to strong. They solve different problems. In the first article in this series, I described five questions I use to evaluate a treatment decision: what I know, what outcome I want, what supports the intervention, what acting or waiting could cost, and what would change my decision. This article turns those questions into a monitoring and escalation plan. ...

In 2012, I wrote two posts about a sore throat. The first described the home remedies I was trying. The second reproduced a long prescription that included ciprofloxacin, a mucolytic, lozenges, vitamin C, herbal cough syrup, and a combination cold tablet. Two years later, I turned that experience into advice. In a Persian post I wrote that someone with a cold and sore throat “definitely” needed antibiotics. I was wrong. More importantly, I can now see how I reached the wrong conclusion. ...