Join me as I learn about software, self-hosting and all things DIY
If you don't know yet, I've started my own IT consultancy! Yay! The most interesting part, from a builder's perspective of course, was thinking about what new services I'll likely need to spin up in my homelab. Let's take a look at a few areas we need to cover in our one-man-consultancy. Tracking opportunities and getting clients Before you start working for a client, you first have to find them…
If you've read my My hardware post, you've seen that I had a gaming PC at some point. I cannibalized its graphics card for my server to run speech-to-text models on it for my Home Assistant, which means no more gaming for me. Or does it? VM gaming For a while, before I ran the STT model on it, I created a gaming VM, passed through the graphic card and gamed on it. It worked fine! The server was…
I grew up in the music CD era, which meant I could take a look at our family CD collection, pick what I wanted to listen to, pop it into a CD player and voila, music! The collection was not that big, it was music that my parents liked, but at least I had agency . I could listen to music without involving anyone else from a very young age. Today, most kids aren't that lucky. All they can do is ask…
I've started my HomeLabbing journey with Proxmox quite a few years ago, thinking I would have many VMs and LXC containers doing so many things. In the end I've ditched Proxmox for NixOS, I'm using one server and many baremetal systemd services. I run 75 of those and only 3 containers. I've yet to use LXC containers. But lately I've been itching for some gaming and I've got nothing to game on! I've…
At work, we've had to come up with a way to access devices hiding behind firewalls at a few different locations. This is a great fit for a VPN. Let's explore how to set up a manageable private VPN in the public cloud. We'll leverage podman and systemd to manage a container. The plan We'll use WireGuard as our VPN solution, it's fast, simple, modern and secure, and manage it with wg-easy . Caddy…
I have lots of little machines! This post will describe them and what I use them for. Let's go! The Server This is my crown jewel custom-built box. It runs most of my services; it is my cloud ( NextCloud ), password manager ( Vaultwarden ), git forge ( Forgejo ), media server (the *arrs and Plex ), and lots and lots more. Here are the specs: CPU: AMD EPYC 7402P 24-Core Processor Usage varies,…
So if you've followed along my Create a static blog with Nix blog post you might have noticed an issue when serving the files. When you update a blog post and deploy it to the server, you check it on your phone to see the new changes, but they are just not showing! You have to do a hard-refresh for them to show up. You investigate and notice that the server is always returning 304 Not Modified for…
This blog has been written with Eleventy . It handles the static site generation part, like converting markdown to HTML, routes and so on. Classic static site generator stuff. Their slogan is "Eleventy is a simpler static site generator" and so far I think it lives up to it. What I don't like about it is that you need to install Node.js on your machine to get it to work. I seriously considered…
So this is the very first post on this blog. Woo! I've been thinking about starting a blog for a while now, there just wasn't ever a right time. Anyway, here we are, let's do this! What I'll write about I always have a few projects that I'd like to start working on and a few that are in progress. Right now I'm waiting to get some time to start working on an eInk-display-based image frame and…