DEV Community: The Masked Maori

Your Website Could Be Down Right Now and You Wouldn't Know

The Masked Maori — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:31:00 +0000

I built a website uptime monitor that runs on your PC, checks your sites every few minutes, and sends you a Telegram alert the second something goes down. No cloud service, no monthly fee, no 10-site limit.

The Problem

Your website goes down at 2am. You find out at 9am when a customer emails you. That's 7 hours of lost traffic, lost sales, and lost trust.

It happens more often than you think. Hosting glitches, SSL certificate expirations, DNS issues, server overloads. Small sites go down for hours without anyone noticing.

The monitoring services that exist — UptimeRobot, Pingdom, StatusCake — they work, but:

Free tiers limit you to 5-10 sites
Check intervals are 5+ minutes on free plans
Paid plans cost $7-20/month
Your data lives on their servers

What It Does

A website uptime monitor that runs locally on your PC:

Monitor Unlimited Sites — No artificial limits. Add as many URLs as you want.
Telegram Alerts — Get a message the second a site goes down. Get another when it recovers. Includes the error and timestamp.
Response Time Tracking — Know not just if your site is up, but how fast it's responding. Catch slowdowns before they become outages.
Daily Summary — Every morning, get a report of all sites with uptime percentage and average response times.
Full History Log — Every check is logged to CSV. Generate reports anytime showing uptime stats, response trends, and downtime incidents.
Configurable Everything — Check interval (1-60 minutes), timeout, expected status codes. Monitor APIs, not just websites.

How It Works

Run the setup wizard
Add your websites
Paste your Telegram bot token (optional but recommended)
It checks every X minutes in the background
You get pinged when something breaks

That's it. Leave it running on your PC, a Raspberry Pi, or a cheap VPS.

Why Run It Locally?

No site limits — Monitor 5 sites or 500
No monthly fee — One-time purchase
Your data stays yours — Logs on your machine, not someone else's cloud
Customisable — Change the check interval, add custom status codes, monitor APIs
Telegram integration — Instant mobile alerts, not emails that sit in your inbox

Who It's For

Anyone who runs a website and wants to know when it's down
Freelance developers monitoring client sites
Small businesses that can't afford enterprise monitoring
Side project owners who want peace of mind
Sysadmins who want a lightweight secondary monitor

Get It

Available now on Gumroad for $9.99:
https://maskedmaori.gumroad.com/

Know when your sites go down. Instantly. No subscription required.

Built by The Masked Maori. Sleep well knowing your sites are watched.

Tags: #monitoring #uptime #website #telegram #devops #python #automation #alerts

Stop Paying Mailchimp $13/Month to Send Personalised Emails

The Masked Maori — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 06:03:53 +0000

I built a mail merge tool that sends personalised emails to a list of contacts from a CSV file. Write one template, send hundreds of unique emails. Works with Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo. No subscription, no cloud, runs on your PC.

The Problem

You've got 200 clients you need to email. Maybe it's a product launch, a price update, or just a newsletter. You want each email to feel personal — "Hi Sarah" not "Hi valued customer."

Your options:

Mailchimp — Free up to 500 contacts, then $13/month. And good luck making it not look like a marketing email.
Copy-paste in Gmail — Manually. For 200 people. Changing the name each time. No.
BCC everyone — Looks lazy, no personalisation, and half the emails land in spam.

None of these are great. So I built something better.

What It Does

A mail merge tool that sends personalised emails from a CSV file:

Load Contacts from CSV — Any columns you add become merge fields. Name, company, product, city — whatever you need.
Write One Template — Use {name}, {company}, {product} placeholders. Each email gets personalised automatically.
Preview Before Sending — See every email rendered with real data before a single one goes out. Catch mistakes before they're permanent.
Smart Send Delay — Configurable pause between emails so you don't trigger spam filters. Default 2 seconds.
Attachment Support — Attach a PDF, brochure, or any file. Same attachment goes to everyone.
Full Send Log — CSV log with timestamps, recipient, subject, and status for every email. Know exactly what sent and what failed.
Save & Reload Campaigns — Config saves automatically. Run the same campaign again next month without re-entering everything.

Supported Providers

Works with any email provider that supports SMTP:

Gmail — Use an App Password (guide included)
Outlook / Hotmail — Regular password works
Yahoo — App Password required (guide included)
Custom SMTP — Any server, any port

Why Not Use Mailchimp / Sendinblue / ConvertKit?

They're designed for marketing emails. Your recipients know it's a mass email because it looks like one — unsubscribe links, tracking pixels, template layouts.

This tool sends emails that look like you typed them personally. They land in the primary inbox, not the Promotions tab. No tracking, no branding, no "sent via Mailchimp" footer.

And it's a one-time purchase instead of $13-50/month.

Who It's For

Small business owners doing client outreach
Freelancers sending proposals to a list of leads
Event organisers sending personalised invitations
Recruiters reaching out to candidates
Anyone who sends the same email to lots of people with small variations

Get It

Available now on Gumroad for $9.99:
https://maskedmaori.gumroad.com/

One template. Hundreds of personal emails. Zero monthly fees.

Built by The Masked Maori. Send smarter, not harder.

Tags: #email #mailmerge #automation #marketing #business #python #productivity

Why I Built a Tax Tracker for Australian FIFO Workers (and Why You Need One)

The Masked Maori — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 06:32:40 +0000

I got sick of scrambling at EOFY, so I built Tax-E — a desktop app that tracks your income, stock trades, crypto, dividends, and deductions all year, then spits out a PDF for your accountant.

The Problem

Every June, the same thing happens.

You dig through emails looking for payslips. You try to remember which stocks you sold and when. You open your crypto exchange and stare at 200 transactions wondering which ones are taxable. Your accountant asks for your deductions and you hand them a shoebox of receipts.

Sound familiar?

If you're a FIFO worker, tradie, or anyone juggling a salary plus investments on the side, tax time is a nightmare. The ATO wants everything — PAYG summaries, capital gains calculated, franking credits, work deductions etc.

So I decided to streamline it.

What I Built

Tax-E is a desktop application for Windows that tracks everything the ATO cares about:

PAYG Income — Enter your payslips manually or scan PDF payslips with OCR. It pulls out the gross, tax, super, and net automatically.
Stock Trades — Import your trade history from CommSec, SelfWealth, eToro, or Pearler via CSV. Tax-E calculates your capital gains using the FIFO method — exactly as the ATO requires.
Cryptocurrency — Same deal. Import from Swyftx, Binance, or CoinSpot. It handles the FIFO matching, tracks your cost base, and even knows about the 12-month CGT discount.
Dividends — Track dividend income and franking credits. Import from your broker or add manually.
Work Deductions — Log deductions by category (tools, travel, uniform, home office, etc.) throughout the year so you're not guessing in June.
EOFY Export — When tax time hits, click one button and get a professional PDF summary. Hand it to your accountant. Done.

Why Not Just Use a Spreadsheet?

I tried that. For about two years. Here's what happened:

I forgot to update it for three months
The formulas broke when I added a new column
I had no idea how to calculate crypto capital gains properly
My accountant couldn't read my mess

Tax-E solves all of that. It's purpose-built for Australian tax. It knows about financial years (July to June), it knows about the FIFO method, it knows about franking credits and the CGT discount.

The Tech Stack

For the developers reading this:

Python with Streamlit for the web UI
ReportLab for PDF generation
Pandas for data handling
Plotly for the dashboard charts
pypdfium2 + Tesseract for OCR payslip scanning
All data stored locally in JSON files — no database, no cloud

The app runs as a local Streamlit server and opens in your browser. It's packaged with an Inno Setup installer for Windows so non-technical users can install it with a double-click.

Privacy First

This was important to me. Your financial data is sensitive. Tax-E stores everything locally on your computer in simple JSON files. No cloud sync. No accounts. No tracking. No analytics.

You own your data. Full stop.

Who It's For

FIFO workers juggling salary + investments
Tradies with ABN income
Anyone who trades stocks or crypto in Australia
Freelancers tracking income from multiple sources
Basically anyone who dreads EOFY

What's Next

Tax-E gets updated every July with new tax brackets when the ATO changes rates. Buy once, get updates for life.

I'm also working on a bunch of other productivity tools — invoice generators, automation scripts, and templates. You can check them all out on my Gumroad store.

Try It

Tax-E is available now on Gumroad:
https://maskedmaori.gumroad.com/

If you're an Australian taxpayer who's sick of the EOFY scramble, give it a go. Your accountant will thank you.

Built by The Masked Maori. Tools for people who'd rather be doing anything else at tax time.

Tags: #australia #tax #python #productivity #streamlit #fifo #capitalgains #eofy