Home on Shantanu Kulkarny

Asterix in Spain

Being a lifelong fan of Asterix, this inspiration comes from Uderzo’s artwork. The most endearing quality of his work is that in my school-going age, he made a world that I wanted to step right into.

That's what I think of your fish

I love this panel. Obelix has been made to go buy fish from Unhygenix. Fullyautomatix somehow gets involved and the whole village is fighting before long. I purposely left out Unhygenix from this painting as I wanted to focus on the rare moments when Obelix becomes angry.

7th Dec 2025

This is my Now page. It was inspired by Derek Sivers . You should probably make one too What I’m doing now # Last updated: 7th Dec, 2025. About two years ago, an idea sparked out of fireside conversations with friends and started taking shape. The idea was to build a product for Identity Governance, implementing and leveraging the capabilities of a graph database and modern Web UI, trying to…

Pelican ASCII Art Render

Addressing the Elephant in the Cybersecurity Room

The Promise # The current generation of IGA products was built in an era where IT environments were fairly static and the workforce was primarily based in controlled network locations and on-premise facilities. IGA as a concept evolved to provide centralised control over human identity lifecycles, including automated provisioning, access certification, rudimentary RBAC, request management, and…

Driving into Hyprland

Opinionated # Youtube lately surfaced some really great videos that introduced me to Omarchy - an opinionated (love that word, by the way) Linux setup/configuration based on Arch linux. The name comes from the Japanese term “Omakase” - a style of ordering food where we entrust the chef to choose and prepare the meal for us, instead of picking dishes from the menu. I’m used to…

Landlines made us more mobile

Ironically, landlines made us more mobile and mobiles made us more stagnant. Today I made sure my mobile never left its spot - the remotest corner in the house possible. You’d be surprised how easily I was able to suppress the urge to look at the screen. Saw a trend on the gram that 18th October is being promoted as a no-screen day. So many influencers putting up swanky reels of playing…

29th Sept 2025

This is my Now page. It was inspired by Derek Sivers . You should probably make one too What I’m doing now # Last updated: 29th Sept, 2025. I’m currently in the process of deciding how best to image and archive all the art work I painted over the past couple of years, and have it displayed here in a separate section. Hence the half-empty “art” section up at the top. More…

Flying colours of k9s

The new homelab setup worked like a beast! The whole new setup on Kubernetes with all my essential apps I need while I am away from home worked flawlessly throughout my vacation. To top it off, just look at this beautiful k9s dashboard:

Still Life

My day job has kept me super busy and I’ve not had much chance to write as often or paint as often. I’ve also recently been to India for a vacation and I noticed art supplies are much more accessible and affordable. So, since I’ve always wanted to give oil paints a try, I got some supplies back with me, and this here is my initial attempt at a still life.

Still life in oil #1

I always thought oil painting to be intimidating, but finally invested the time and a little bit of money to try my first attempt. This was painted by following a Youtube tutorial and it clearly taught me a few core concepts. It also introduced me to how oil paints work, and what, as a beginner, should be my thought process before even I pick up a brush.

7th Sep 2025

This is my Now page. It was inspired by Derek Sivers . You should probably make one too What I’m doing now # Last updated: 7th Sept, 2025. Well, the extended vacation is over. We’re back at our home in Ipswich, where the weather promises to turn into the predictable golden hues of autumn. The work and school have resumed with vigour. Here. We. Go. 📖 Learning # A fresh perspective on…

Iceland farm

We did a boys trip to Iceland back in 2016. I picked up a coffee table book of Icelandic photos and I’ve always wanted to paint a few. This is one of them. By far the most stunning place I’ve been to.

DDNS

With any homelab setup, you would ideally want to expose some of your services to the public. There are many usecases, and subsequently there are many ways you can implement those usecases. For instance, you might want to access your Plex library over the internet using a personal domain. Others might choose to restrict the access and availability by setting up a VPN tunnel, which gives only…

We're back

And we’re back! skny.uk is back again after a fairly long downtime. The new homelab is now up with a Kubernetes led implementation and a much cleaner, leaner architecture, borne out of lessons learnt from Phase 1. What lessons? I’ll follow up with another post detailing the new arch and problems with the previous.

Downtime

The blog, the site and the entire homelab is down for maintenance as I overhaul and rethink my strategy for Phase 2. The new version of the infrastructure is going to be more robust, well thought through and hopefully more resilient.

Infrastructure as code

It is always great to learn something new, try it hands-on, fail a couple of times, and then get it to work. My experience with coding so far has been limited to the bare minimum required by whatever IAM solution I helped design and implement. I have always learned on the go. As such, I’ve never been required to “get my hands dirty” in DevOps and this world is entirely alien to…

26th April 2025

This is my Now page. It was inspired by Derek Sivers . You should probably make one too . What I’m doing now # Last updated: 26th April, 2025. I’m living in Ipswich, UK. The weather’s been uncharacteristically sunnier than usual at this time of the year. Taking advantage of this by catching up on some garden work and taking care of the plants. 📖 Learning # The aphids did NOT win…

Homelab architecture

Adding a bit of colour to this otherwise plain site. Been meaning to come up with an easy explainer of the components of my homelab and finally got around to do the architecture diagram in Obsidian excalidraw. There’s a lot more containers doing things behind the scenes, but these are the most “functional” ones.

The Alliance of Roses

I recently learned that aphids (tiny little green bugs), which tend to inflict rose plants in multitudes, are better controlled by introducing ladybugs in the garden. This promotes a healthy ecosystem in the garden. I also learned that ants are best friends with aphids, and help them by protecting them. This is because aphids apparently help secrete some syrup-y substance that’s yum for ants.…

I built a website from scratch. This is what I learned.

Its 2025 and I built a personal website and hosted it on my own homelab. I like having hands-on experience and it is an effective method for learning. I like working on tech that is new and interesting to me, and getting to build something from the bottom up is a very rewarding experience. This way, I get to learn new skills with practical real-life experience. Here’s a list of things that I…

Silos - Part I

Dystopia # Dystopian sci-fi movies and TV shows portray an outcome of the world that is stark and oppressive, often violent. The oppression is in the form of stringent and overbearing rules and laws, and Power to rule over people lies in the hands of a select few people. The super-concentration of this power creates an atmosphere of extreme inequality and there is an undercurrent of despair in the…

ArtLung: “spite swimming | sanity swimming” (one-sheet) ~ 25 Nov 2024

liked: ArtLung: “spite swimming | sanity swimming” (one-sheet) ~ 25 Nov 2024

Webmentions - done

Webmentions are now implemented, and it feels..underwhelming. I loved the idea and the implementation, but its not for me, at least not now.

What's next?

So I got my own site up, and here’s a few improvements I made: Made it presentable. Learned enough CSS, HTML and Go to conditionally render different fonts with different elements. Made a Gravatar profile, and use their API to fetch my avatar and display it as a display pic for my site. A rudimentary pipeline for posting to Mastodon and displaying the thread on my post. But what now? I will…

Brain-made

I came across this video by the awesome Youtuber No Boilerplate and felt this resonates very well with #IndieWeb concepts. I don’t necessarily hate AIs, but I love humans. I want to be able to express my creativity in writing and watercolours and very clearly say this was made by a human. So with this in mind, I’ve decided to start using the Brainmade mark on long form or art content…

Visions of the future

Visions of the future are usually inspired by movies of that age. Retro-futuristic movies are amazing examples of this. However, in the recent past, there seem to be no movies that evoke a sense of expectancy for the future. Its just zombies all the way down. Would love to be proven otherwise, if anyone has any recommendations!

Troy

I am about third of the way into the book and the language and tone makes history and mythology very approachable and relatable. By nature Greek mythology is inter-mixed with ancient history and it’s very hard to draw a distinction between the two, but the book so far has not even tried to do that. Instead, it makes it a point to mix the two and tell a tale of gods, legends, heroes and men…

Writing is thinking

A higher purpose # This post has less than 1% chance of being read by a human. The chances of it being read by a machine are slightly (at best) higher than that. Writing on a personal blog tends to have that effect. For me, writing has two overall goals: we write to communicate, or we write to learn. Both these goals make Writing, at its core, an epistemic practice. It actively contributes to the…

5th April 2025

This is my Now page. It was inspired by Derek Sivers . You should probably make one too . What I’m doing now # Last updated: 5th April, 2025. I’m living in Ipswich, UK. I work at Novartis as an Identity and Access Management architect. 📖 Reading # I’m listening to The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, currently on the 4th book. It’s a nice way to spend time in the car…

We did start the fire

We did start the fire this time around. It may have been burning since the world’s been turning, but we collectively put a can of gasoline to it.

Comments from Mastodon are live

Thanks to Google AI Studio, and the IndieWeb community, I have managed to integrate Mastodon comments on to my site.

So much out there

There’s literally so much out there on the web that resonates with me but was never ever surfaced, having been silo-ed in by the big ones. Just came across IndieWeb

skny.uk

The site is now live at skny.uk

3rd April 2025

What I’m doing now # Last updated: 3rd April, 2025. I’m living in Ipswich, UK, a laid back coastal town. I work at Novartis as an Identity and Access Management architect. Reading # I’m currently listening to The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, currently on the 4th book. It’s a nice way to spend time in the car while on school runs and errands. I also recently got a…

Homelab - Putting it to the test

A work assignment took me away from my home for a few days, and I thought this would be the best time to put my Homelab through its paces. This was exactly the kind of scenario I had in mind when I started the self-hosting journey last year. So to ensure this was a successful test, I began with some prep work. Preparation # I first made a list of all the use cases I needed from my Homelab while I…

Be Curious about Security

Hyperconnectivity # I have an unflattering confession to make – I spend approximately 2 hours everyday of the week, on my mobile device, outside of the already 8 hours of time that I spend on my work computer on weekdays. And this is actually after making a conscious effort to reduce the amount I spend on my phone. To back it up with numbers, here is a snapshot of my daily usage over the past…

Day one: Getting started with a Homelab

Hardware # I took stock of what I had. I already had a rudimentary setup in place with a Raspberry Pi running a NAS and a PiHole. I have an old MacBook Pro which I no longer use due to a broken keyboard. I have cables. Lots of them. I have a couple of External USB drives with some data on it, but with enough free space on all of them. I have a good internet connection. That’s it,…

You should build your own internet (or at least some part of it)

In a world where convenience is king, we’ve unknowingly traded control of our digital lives for the lure of the latest tech trends. The Web today is an alluring trap, triggering a dopamine addiction that research shows has become an evolutionary trait in humans. Have you ever wondered who’s really benefiting from our endless consumption of gadgets and services? There is no denying we…

Robin Hood's Bay

Medium: Ink & Watercolour, paper Size: 10" x 14" A study based on a style I liked and got inspired from an artist on Instagram.

Kyoto

Medium: Ink & Watercolour, paper Size: 10" x 14" This was painstakingly difficult to study. The details and architecture of the building are so intricate in real-life, my humble efforts do not do any justice to this beautiful, beautiful temple.

Wisteria

Medium: Ink & Watercolour, paper Size: 10" x 14" Trying out different styles - the shades of lavender are subtle yet pull you in and hold attention.

Leissigen Kirche

Medium: Ink & Watercolour, paper Size: 10" x 14" Inspired by a photo taken on one of the more memorable train trips of my life, on the way from Basel to Interlaken. Simply stunning surroundings.