On computers and the night sky
In the previous post about 3D printing I wrote how amazed I was that I could just start printing, without any calibration, and the prints would be perfect each time. And that was true for a while, I went through the first roll of filament without any issues. But mid through the second roll, the prints started to lose quality, the corners were lifting up from the print bed, but still the print…
Click to skip the introduction and go straight to the results. The first part of the story is that, as I already wrote here and here , I am using self-hosted Umami as the analytics engine for this blog. I am using it because I am curious to know how many people visit my blog, and I like numbers and graphs. Of course in this day and age, saying "humans" is a stretch, because you can never be sure…
I was thinking of doing something special for the 100th post, but I could not decide what to do, so instead I'll do just some random bits and pieces. I've been living on the Internet since the early 00s and during that time I had many different blogs and blog-like sites. Some disappeared of natural causes, some can still be found. A photo from one of my blog posts from 2009. This is my laptop of…
My Python pet project powers on, package on PyPi published, pyriodic parsing possible! I had to do that. Now, without alliteration, I am happy to inform that Pyriodic Backend, version 0.3.0 has been published to PyPi and is available for download. pyriodic-backend 0.3.0 on PyPI But what is it? Pyriodic Backend is my project aiming at creating a "backend" framework for the small, static websites. I…
I remember that in those ancient times when the year number still had two zeroes in the middle, I read an article in a computer magazine, it was either CD-Action, or CHIP, an article about this new idea: a printer that could print object in 3D from plastic! The article said that already prototypes were being build, and maybe one day in the future this novel idea might become popular. The 3D…
This is a topic that I have been planning to dive into for a long time, but I kept procrastinating. Yet, finally I sat down to it and found out it is much, much simple than I anticipated. I am a fan of MikroTik. They make high quality network devices for a good price, and they are based within the EU, in Latvia, close to my country of Poland. On the other hand, the learning curve of their software…
As I already mentioned in oh so many blog posts, I now live in a house, which opens totally new possibilities when doing astrophography. I no longer have to drive a long way just to get to the spot, and then spend hours either outside in the cold, or in a small shed. Now all I need is to carry out the equipment in the evening, do the setup and polar alignment when it gets acceptably dark, and then…
As with other such posts on my blog, this is not sponsored in any way, I just write about the things I personally use and think are worth sharing. In the process of rewriting my blog I changed how I host my videos. I currently have two posts with embedded short videos: How to make a timelapse with a Raspberry Pi I started using ESPhome and now I have a local smarthome Previously I stored the video…
Yesterday, Michał Sapka , Poland's favourite blogger according to a certain Australian posted on the Fediverse a toot about human.json . human.json is intended to be a way of presenting that this specific website is written by humans, not AI. It also allows to vouch for other websites, that the author of this one knows that those other websites are also written by humans. I would call it a…
First of all, apologies to all the RSS readers of my blog, you'll most probably get all the posts again. Almost two months have passed since the last blog post. The reason for the hiatus is simple. Three weeks ago I have finally, finally moved into my new house. Those were hectic two months, endless calls, decisions, talking to the construction crew, buying materials, tools, and then packing,…
I like using the terminal (also called the console). On every computer I use, I always have it opened as one of the windows. I use it for SSHing into my homelab and VPSes, installing apps, managing files. I prefer the terminal rather than clicking through a GUI. So, if it's a tool that I use so often, why not make it more usable and prettier? In this blog post I want to show my terminal setup, the…
I have moved this blog's CDN from AWS Cloudfront to Bunny CDN . This is one more step in me moving away from US corporations to smaller European companies. With everything that is happening in the world right now, I do not consider my data safe when stored on US soil, and I do not want to give my money to fuel companies and people who are, to put it bluntly, aggressive towards Europe, European…
Tomorrow is the last day of 2025, and there is a high probability that the next year will be 2026, just like Saturday comes after Friday, and Sunday comes afterwards . 2025 was also the first full year that I have been using Umami as my online analytics service to track people visiting my blog. I know that "tracking people" sounds bad, but as I said many times, I just do it because I like looking…
This is very much a first steps post. I know I have barely scratched the surface of Proxmox, and I am sure that a lof of the things that I wrote here can be done better, but for now I just wanted to share my first impressions and first usecases of running Proxmox in my homelab. Back in August I wrote how I tried to turn a Lenovo Thincentre Tiny M720q into a gaming PC. How I bought a Tiny PC and…
Apologies, I was sure I was taking more screenshots, but now I cannot find them, another thing I did not handle well. My VPS got hacked, and this is the postmortem of the whole situation, written down as a precaution and for future reference. On Friday evening I took a look at my Grafana dashboard for the VPS and saw that for the last hour the CPU usage was at constant 100% on all cores with a…
I am very happy to inform that my Python project, Pyriodic Backend, has been published to PyPi, and is for anyone to use with the code available as open source. Pyriodic Backend on Codeberg Pyriodic Backend on PyPi Pyriodic What? Pyriodic Backend is my idea to create the simplest possible "backend" service for updating static HTML websites with absolutely minimum resources. With Pyriodic Backend,…
I don't remember the exact date when my GoToSocial instance was launched, but I am quite sure it was somewhere around late November of 2024. Which means that my very own server in the Fediverse is one year old. And on that occasion I would like to do some sort of an introspection of where I am and how did I reach this point. Origins The idea to host my own instance in the Fediverse came to me for…
I've been spending too much time on online marketplaces for secondhand items. Well, at least when I actually buy something from those sites, it's already used, so I'm not pumping mindless consumption that much . Anyway, the result of one of those crawls is this tiny device: An Orange Pi Zero 3. I bought it for ~100PLN (25EUR) with shipping, and the seller included a WiFi antenna and a radiator…
To skip the boring memories and go straight to the technical part. I am a millenial, born at the end of the 80s, and my listening-to-music history is probably rather typical of my generation in the so-called "western world". First I listened to music from cassettes, you know, those rectanglish things you could rewind with a pencil. I still remember that the first cassette I bought with my own…
I've read somewhere that Intel for many years has been doing a tick-tock model in his development cycle. Thankfully, it had nothing to do with the Chinese data-hoarding, addiction-inducing short video app, but rather with how they improved their products. First was the tick, creating a new machining process, and then the tock, expanding and perfecting it. More on the whole cycle can be read on its…
As I already mentioned several times, I am in the process of building my future house. One of the things I look to having the most, is a separate technical room. It will be mostly for things like the heat pump and the electrical box, but it will also have the space for a server rack. Which means I will be able to move my whole homelab, both the networking and computers, into a single place. This…
This is hopefully the first post in the "Today I #TIL" series. Yes, I know :) Hi Amin:) The idea is to make shorter blog posts about one or two new things that I learned more or less on the same day as the blog post. Today something unsuspecting happened. I was working away, writing Python and all that stuff, when the Internet broke. I had WiFi, but no Internet access. I assumed my ISP was acting…
Here is my newest project: a webpage running on an off-grid server powered solely by solar panels. solar.stfn.pl The Background I am in the middle of building my house. I mean, I am not building it personally, the construction workers, plumbers, electricians are doing it. The house is in the middle of a piece of land my wife and I bought in 2022. Next to the house there is a shed which we have…
I have not had a desktop PC since spring of last year. At that time I sold my desktop because I felt laptops were enough for me, it was taking up a lot of desktop space and its configuration made any significant upgrades costly. As time passed I start to miss the capabilities of a full size PC, mostly the power of a discrete GPU. Not only for gaming, but also for other stuff, like GPU acceleration…
In April of this year I wrote the Access local Nextcloud with HTTPS anywhere by using Tailscale TLS certificates blog post in which I showed how I am using Tailscale-generated certificates to access my locally hosted services with HTTPS. Since that time I have been happily using Nextcloud, Forgejo, and other apps via Tailscale with that glorious padlock visible in the browser address bar. But…
Almost a year has passed since I wrote the last State of my homelab update , and that means it is high time to write a new one. In the recent months my homelab has seen many changes, both in hardware and software, so there is a lot ot to talk about. Networking I recently wrote a blog post about my networking setup , so here let's just have a short summary: At the time of writing the previous state…
I've got this idea that I want to try out: A Dockerless homeprod. The emphasis here is on prod, because I will still be using Docker for testing out stuff and learning, but for my home "production" I am migrating from Docker to other solutions like LXD, for reasons I described for example in Deploying Nextcloud locally with LXD . And speaking of that Canonical-owned container and VM orchestrator,…
I decided I want to try out tracking my expenses, and after some research I went with trying out Actual Budget . I've been using it for a few days now and the outlook is promising, I will report my experiences once I use it more. However, I had some issues when setting it up with LXD so I am writing down how I worked out a working solution here for others to benefit from. And for me for the time…
This is the next episode in my series on using Pi-hole, the previous ones are: WireGuard and PiHole for secure ad blocking on your smartphone Using PiHole and Tailscale to block ads on all my devices, including mobile Wait, I just saw it took me three blog posts to realize that Pi-hole is written with a hyphen :O A few weeks ago, my part of the Fediverse was full of discussions about DNS that were…
This will be a very short and simple blog post, but as I said in one of the previous ones, my aim for this year is to use this blog also for, well, blogging, and not only elaborate tutorials how to do computer shenanigans. I really like the word shenanigans . Folding@Home In the last few weeks I have been occasionally crunching Folding@Home . It's a nice change of pace after years of doing only…
This post is a continuation of my WireGuard and PiHole for secure ad blocking on your smartphone post. I'm writing it because I changed my PiHole setup and wanted to showcase it. Also PiHole released version 6, which changes a lot, and I thought it would be good to write about the new way of configuring it. My Fairphone 4 with the PiHole admin interface opened in Firefox. The queries graph is…
I achieved one hundred million points in Einstein@Home . Another BOINC achievement, this time for a specific project. Einstein@Home has always been one of my favourite BOINC projects, with an interesting topic, and as important, a great, very communicative team of admins, and a welcoming community. My Einstein@Home certificate, with a very "early 00s" design Of course those points don't mean much…
I bought a new router and now my home network is mostly Mikrotik. Before I start talking about the network setup, let me lay some context of where I am: There are two main factors why my current network setup is configured in such a way: Sometime in the future, maybe end of this year, maybe early next year, I will be moving to my own house, and there will be a full sized server rack in a separate…
During the last few days I did two migrations, the first one I had been planning for some time, the second one was more spontaneous, and they were directly related to one another. First I migrated the VPS hosting my GoToSocial instance from RackNerd to Hetzner. After that I migrated one of my main Fediverse accounts from Fosstodon to my GoToSocial instance, fedi.stfn.pl . Moving from RackNerd to…
This blog post is of course not sponsored by Tailscale, I just really like them This blog post continues the topic of running Nextcloud in an LXD container, but the matters discussed here are universal and can also be applied to any service running locally in your LAN. In the previous blog post I mentioned that when using Nextcloud, I am getting a warning that the connection is not secure. That is…
As I mentioned in the previous blog post, I am now in the process of moving some of my homelab services from Docker to LXC (Linux Containers). Both of them are virtualization technologies and are based on similar concepts, but recently I found LXC more tempting. Disclaimer 1: I would not call myself an expert in either Docker or LXD, what I write below is based on the limited knowledge that I have…
Do you know those days that you cannot start doing anything, because you are going out in the evening? That has been the situation for me for the last month and something. The construction of my future house is just about to start, and I could not make myself to start new things, or continue existing projects. But hopefully this hiatus will come to and end, the last bureaucratic (how do you spell…
FIX TUBE URL I don't have anything to write about computers for now. Not much is happening for me on this field. My homelab is still homelabbing, BOINC is being crunched, my Pi cluster is running, things are going their own course. But I have this growing frustration about the state of world affairs and this is the place where I can vent it. But STFN, this is a blog about technology, don't add…
I'm slowly going back to astrophotography. So far my best year in AP was 2022 (apart from the famous comet ), as my Astrobin gallery shows. Since then I either have not had the time, or the energy, or the weather was awful for weeks. Also the last year or so I have been fighting with equipments problems, stopping me from doing any useful work. But I'm coming back, I want to come back and do it…
I was tagged by 82Mhz to answer this set of questions, so here it goes: When Did You First Get Interested In Technology? I've been interested in technology as long as I remember. I think there were multiple sources of this. First one would be my grandfather, who as a child growing up in hard times, had to have a wide set of skills. Today he could be called a tinkerer and a maker. He showed me how…
Apart from these few posts about simple things in MicroPython, this is the first post on this blog in which I talk about programming in Python in a slightly more advanced way. My official job title is "Senior Python Developer", and I feel that I do have some experience in working with Python, but I've never before felt that I had something interesting enough to share on this blog in that area. And…
I felt like also giving a go at this challenge. The replies I read at other peoples' blog were very interesting, thank you all for sharing your life <3 Why did you start blogging? I enjoy sharing knowledge. I think it runs in the family, as both of my parents are teachers. Also I enjoy connecting with people online. I've been living on the Internet since forever, and all that time I enjoyed not…
This post is in a way an extension of my previous one about Pinchflat . Pinchflat is a service to download Youtube videos to your local hard drive. I have been using it for quite some time now to download videos from my favourite YT channels. There are a few reasons why I download Youtube videos. One of them being data preservation. As I wrote before, nothing on the Internet is permanent, and we…
I have a Raspberry Pi cluster ( citation needed ). One of the uses for it is crunching BOINC. Running the BOINC daemon means that the Pis' CPUs are constantly running at almost 100% load. And so they make a lot of heat. The Pis are powered by POE+ HATs, which also produce heat themselves and at the same time restrict airflow. The HATs have their own fans, but those are noisy when they ramp up. All…
Continuing the theme of a smart home, I wanted to talk about my Home Assistant setup. During the Christmas break, when time does not exist and boredom is common, I was browsing the website of a company that sells cheap post-lease computer parts. What got my attention was the sale of a Lenovo Ultra Small Form Factor (USFF) PC with the price of 120 PLN. That is around 30 eur, and around half the…
tl;dr My home server idles at 70 watts. Longer version I started going deeper into the smart home rabbit hole, and one of the areas I want to investigate is the monitoring of power consumption. The smart home rabbit hole, which is something different than the smart rabbit home hole, which is the place where intelligent small mammals live. I've been reading a lot of Rubenerd lately and his writing…
In the last two months I managed to buy two cheap, second-hand Raspberry Pi 4s with 4GB of RAM. The second one I bought the day after Christmas, it was described as a "failed present". Somebody had a bad experience under the Christmas tree which turned out to be a win for me. Having now enough Raspberry Pis I could start with my plan that I had had for a very long time: create a cluster. Why would…
Happy New Year! Last month I started building my Kubernetes cluster made from Raspberry Pis (I promise there will be a blog post on it soon). At first it was connected with Wi-Fi, but I wanted to switch it to Ethernet, and eventually power it over PoE (Power over Ethernet). I did not not have cables of the right length, so I went browsing through the usual online shops. And then, I had a…
As with the previous post about GoToSocial, you should not take what I write here as gospel. It is possible that I am doing something not in the best way. One of the reasons I write those posts, apart from the need to share what I learnt, is the hope that someone more knowledgeable than I am will pinpoint my mistakes and provide useful feedback. My GoToSocial instance has been running for more…
Ever since I joined the Fediverse a year and a half ago, I had this vague idea that one day I would have my own instance. And here we are, I am now the owner and the admin of fedi.stfn.pl The welcome screen of my instance The final push that made me create my own instance was the sad story of botsin.space , a Fediverse server dedicated to running bots. For the last year I had been running there my…