Skagit CCE ceramics watch

A short-lived NixOS user timer on ringtail that watched the Skagit Community & Continuing Education course catalog for a new ceramics class. Introduced 2026-08-11, retired 2026-09-01 after it succeeded: on 2026-09-01 it caught a new ceramics class (Item Number 38826) the day the college listed it, filed the red heph task, pushed the ntfy alert, and Erich acted on it. Decommissioned per eblume/blumeops#779. This doc is the persistent record of what it was and the AAR.

What it was

A systemd user timer (skagit-cce-watch, every 5 minutes) running a stdlib-only Python script:

• scrapes the Skagit CCE course catalog category page (public ASPX, campusce.net)
• diffs catalog Item Numbers against a baseline state file
• on a new ceramics-sounding title: files a red heph task under the Ceramics project (course link in the task’s context) plus a best-effort ntfy push to the self-hosted ntfy’s ceramics topic (X-Click opens the course page)

Timeline:

• 2026-08-11: introduced (hourly cadence) — blumeops PR #593
• 2026-08-13: cadence raised to every 5 minutes; ntfy push added (heph task 01M098EQ1PVFB1A56BD0MSEANC)
• 2026-09-01: it fired — red task “New ceramics class: Ceramics (item 38826)” (heph 01M1EWASKR5M3CDG0HZD2V3J2J), first seen 2026-09-01
• 2026-09-01: Erich acted; requested retirement + AAR (eblume/blumeops#779)

AAR — what worked

• The red heph task was the primary alert and it landed in the agenda: the college lists classes without notice, and we caught this one day one.
• The two-channel design did its job: the ntfy push reached the phone with a tappable course link; a push failure was never allowed to fail the tick.
• The defensive details paid off through ~3 weeks of operation — first run baselines silently, a zero-course parse fails loudly instead of wiping state, and the item-number keying prevented duplicate alerts. No false alerts, no state loss.

Caveat, honestly logged: the alert took ~45 minutes to get noticed. The ntfy push used the default iOS alert sound, and the red task waited for the next agenda pass. If the watch returns in a broader form, make the alert harder to ignore — a distinct ntfy sound for the topic (ntfy’s iOS app allows per-topic sound settings) or a repeat until acknowledged.

The pattern (if it returns in broader form)

The general pattern: poll a public catalog/feed → diff on a stable item id → title-match → file a red heph task (+ best-effort ntfy push). The building blocks: a systemd user timer/oneshot (user scope so heph can reach eblume’s spoke over XDG_RUNTIME_DIR), stdlib-only Python, a baseline state file, silent first run, fail-loud-on-empty-parse, and a loose regex net for the title match. The watch code itself is in git history (nixos/ringtail/skagit-cce-watch.{nix,py}, PR #593) and is a usable starting point.

Decommission

No ArgoCD involvement: this was a NixOS user unit, and ArgoCD only manages ringtail’s k8s workloads — the host’s NixOS is provisioned out-of-band by the ansible playbook.

Repo side (this PR): deleted nixos/ringtail/skagit-cce-watch.{nix,py}, removed the import from nixos/ringtail/configuration.nix, replaced the reference-card section with a pointer to this doc.

Host side (one-time, after the merge): mise run provision-ringtail (from gilbert) syncs blumeops to ringtail’s /etc/blumeops and runs nixos-rebuild switch --flake /etc/blumeops/nixos/ringtail#ringtail; the activation prunes skagit-cce-watch.{service,timer}. Done 2026-09-01, from a session on ringtail itself: /etc/blumeops checked out to 624a9f77 by hand and the same detached blumeops-nixos-rebuild unit launched with systemd-run — the play’s own pattern minus its vault-backed pre_tasks. systemctl --user list-timers | grep skagit (as eblume) came back empty. Later rebuilds of that shape are requested instead: mise run request-run ringtail-rebuild.yaml <sha> -i revision=<sha> --why "…" (the ringtail-rebuild warrant, once its polkit grant is on the host). Optional: rm -rf ~/.local/state/skagit-cce-watch (baseline state file). ntfy: nothing server-side (the topic was client-side only); remove the ceramics subscription on any phone if desired. heph: the Ceramics project and the success task 01M1EWASKR5M3CDG0HZD2V3J2J stay as the record.