Local Qwen isn't a worse Opus, it's a different tool
We've all heard people say that Qwen is near-Opus level, but I have receipts and am here to be transparent with you.
Alex Ellis' Blog
OSS, Cloud Native & Raspberry Pi
Latest posts
I wrote a replacement for GitHub's code review bot
If GitHub themselves have a native code review bot, why not just use it?
Preview: Slice Up Bare-Metal with Slicer
The easiest and best supported way to learn and deploy Firecracker and microVMs.
I Bought An N100 Mini PC, Then Another
Exploring the capabilities of the Intel N100 Mini PC for work and self-hosting as an alternative to public cloud.
The 90s UNIX Utility That Fell Out of Favour
I reminisce of the days of i386, Slackware Linux, and forgotten plaintext UNIX utilities that are still on modern Macs today.
How to run Firecracker without KVM on cloud VMs
MicroVMs need bare-metal or nested virtualisation with /dev/kvm. But what if that's not available? The PVM virtualisation framework may be the answer.
You might need a portable monitor
I cover why as a one monitor kind of guy, I found a portable monitor essential - both for streaming and for debugging the home lab.
Explore and debug GitHub Actions via SSH
As part of actuated, we needed to debug and explore VM images for GitHub Actions via SSH. I'm now making that available to my GitHub Sponsors for free.
Booting the Raspberry Pi 5 from NVMe
Here's my workflow for setting up the Raspberry Pi 5 to boot from NVMe for headless use.
GitHub Actions as a time-sharing supercomputer
Learn how and why I turned GitHub's APIs into a time-sharing supercomputer from the 1970s to execute modern batch jobs.
First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi 5
For someone who runs the Raspberry Pi as a server, build agent and for Kubernetes, how does the new version stack up? And should you upgrade?
What if your Pods need to trust self-signed certificates?
Self-signed certificates are common within enterprise companies. But how do you distribute them and enable their use in Kubernetes as a user and a vendor?
How to use multiple Docker registry mirrors
Why would you need to use a mirror for a container registry? And is there a way to use two or more? Find out from the actuated team.
Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know
This controversial decision coupled with poor messaging has created anxiety the Open Source community. Learn what's happening and how we can move forward.
Find your total build minutes with GitHub Actions and Golang
You can use our new CLI written in Golang to calculate the total number of build minutes you're using across an organisation with GitHub Actions.