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It’s that time of the year again: time to look back at how I work, the tools I use, and how the next year might look. I’ve been working from home basically full time since the UK went into lockdown 17th March. It’s been quite an adjustment barely leaving the…
GPU Passthrough has become a great way to run a Linux host, but still run games under Windows. By having 2 GPUs, 1 for the Linux host and the other for a Windows VM, you give Windows its own full GPU for games, but without having to run Windows as…
NFS is a great protocol for sharing files quickly and simply over the network. Whilst it’s not designed for end user use, it’s great for mounting directories from remote machines, and having them be performant. NFS’ lack of authentication is in a way a feature, honest. Not only does it…
You should back up your data, properly! If you’re not, you’re playing a dangerous game with fate. Computers are pretty reliable, but they also go wrong, often. You should always backup your files, but backing up a containerized application isn’t quite as simple. A container is 3 things:ConfigurationVolumesNetworking The point…
Black Friday, the only day which seems to last over a month, is a great time to buy tech. Whilst most people will be buying early christmas presents, new gadgets for themselves, or just impulse buying stuff they don’t need (something I totally never do…), I ordered the parts for…
People say there’s no 100% reliable way to wipe a storage drive, and they’re right. By the nature of how mechanical drives work, there’s no real way to say for sure whether the data is ever really gone. With drives, the only way to be sure the content is gone…
I recently added some RGB LED strips around my headboard and bed frame, because everyone needs more RGB in their life. The only thing better than RGB is internet connected RGB. One of the most common controllers for this is the MagicHome. The MagicHome comes with its own firmware, which…
This year’s Hacktoberfest was a little different, mostly in quite how much the internet gave a fuss about it. Given quite how much of the internet was talking about it back in early October, it doesn’t take long to find information and context on why it was so controversial. Here’s…
Recently, I started setting up a new application on my docker host. It was late in the day, and I just wanted to get something up and working to play around with. Just my luck, I was met with wonderfully cryptic error:ERROR: could not find an available, non-overlapping IPv4 address…
I recently had a far from fun morning. I had my website cloned on my desktop, with some commits which weren’t upstreamed. Having done some work on my laptop, upstream was ahead of my desktop, which needed rectifying. git pull -r is a great feature of git, which does a…
The internet is a wild place, filled with well, everything. There are many ways of exposing an application to the internet, but no matter how secure an application claims to be, or how confident you are with your infrastructure, sometimes you may just be more comfortable keeping it internal. Historically,…
After recently deploying a ZFS pool, I realized I had little insight into the health of my drives. I can run SMART stats now and then, but that’s not quite the same.Scrutiny Scrutiny is a tool to help you with just that. It presents a web UI which shows you…
I’ve been using Traefik for a while now, and I’ve helped quite a few people with it, but I still see a lot of people scared off it. This isn’t helped by a lot of guides being incredibly verbose, and not explaining what’s going on very well. Most people I…
Traefik’s dashboard is a great tool to diagnose routing issues, and check services are being detected correctly, but it can’t do much more than that. It doesn’t show any metrics. Instead, it relies (arguably correctly) on external monitoring tools for metrics. Traefik supports 4 metric backends: Datadog, Prometheus, StatsD and…
ZFS is a pretty sweet filesystem, an opinion shared by the majority of the internet it seems. BTRFS (No Wikipedia, it’s not “butter fuss”) is also a nice filesystem, and the fact it’s built-in to the kernel makes it far safer to use as a root filesystem. One of my…
Clickhouse is a column oriented database engine, mostly designed for analytics. It was developed and deployed by Yandex in their analytics offering, but Plausible, my analytics provider of choice, uses it to store the analytics data, as it’s more suited to this than PostgreSQL. Unfortunately, the official docker container is…
Recently, I bought myself a new server from Kimsufi, to function as an off-site backup server. And after fighting with both their management interface and customer services, I finally got it booted. Kimsufi have a respectable list of OS options, however not especially recent. The latest version of Ubuntu they…
Docker containers, and containers as a whole, are really just a regular program wrapped in some extra protections provided by the kernel (namely cgroups etc) to create isolation, and other interesting features. Unlike VMs, containers run closer to the host operating system, so close they use the same kernel, meaning…
The majority of England (where I live) is being hit by quite a heatwave. It’s hot here, like really hot! Us brits are incapable of handling the heat, and enjoy nothing more than telling each other how hot and unbearable it is. I’m definitely guilty of this, and as a…
I only recently talked about using GoAccess as an analytics tool. Over the last couple months, I’ve been more interested in how many hits this website actually gets. GoAccess was a really simple solution which worked on log files and only captured the bits of information I really cared about:…
Last year, I switched all of my hosting from arbitrarily installed packages to Docker. This made installing and configuring incredibly simple, but updating a little less defined. Whilst Docker itself is updated through the system package manager (probably), the containers themselves aren’t. Docker container versions are known as “tags”, and…
Django already does some pretty incredible things when it comes to performance, especially in the ORM layer. The lazy loading, fluent interface for querying means it’ll only fetch the data you need, when you need it. But it can’t handle everything for you, and often needs some help to work…
I write quite a lot. Whether it be coursework, blog posts, or any other random thing. Most of my time is spent in either VSCode or QOwnNotes, neither of which have any kind of spelling and grammar checking. It’s rare I’ll actually go back over something and fully check its…
Storing passwords is a pretty simple problem in software development, right? Wrong! Storing passwords correctly is pretty complicated. With that said, it’s very simple to just lean on work someone else has done, and the libraries available for your language of choice. In reality, you should never do it yourself.…
Duplicati is one of my favourite backup system. It’s pretty fast, supports numerous backup sources, and has a nice configuration web UI. Unfortunately however, it can’t be used to back up remote files. In fact, I can’t find a nice fully-features backup solution which does do this, which sucks. Another…
Traefik is a cloud native reverse proxy, which is basically a fancy way of saying it’s a reverse proxy with some fancy features. Specifically it has fancy features around auto-discovery, and deep integration with technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.Basic concepts Traefik has four fundamental concepts: Entrypoints, routers, middleware and services.…
In the current lockdown situation, a lot of people are starting to eye up that old desktop machine, or Raspberry Pi they bought for a project and just left on a shelf, and thinking of putting it to use, as a server! Naturally, once you’ve got something set up in…
As a part of Nextcloud 17, Nextcloud released Text, a fancy new WYSIWYG editor for markdown with support for collaboration. Personally, I quite liked the old interface: A simple plaintext editor with syntax highlighting, paired with a side-by-side preview. Nextcloud Text was a step in the wrong direction for me,…
A few days ago, I was sharing a blog post to someone on the self-hosted podcast discord, and they asked if I was self-hosting my website. Unfortunately, and rather ironically, I had to answer no. I’ve been intending to move it over to my own server for a while, so…
Recently, I decided to put some analytics on my website. Would be nice to see what view number are like and what pages get the most traffic. Most people would just stick Google Analytics on and be done with. But the privacy implications off that are huge and terrible, not…