In no particular order:
Work
Next Sunday, I’m off to North Macedonia for a week to plan out future work with my current client. I’m thinking it’s a good sign that they’re going to keep renewing my contract for some time. At least long enough I hope, for the UK to get out of the rut it’s in.
Sore Fingers and Chords
Learning how to play guitar feels like it’s going well. I love playing it, and I keep it in the front room where I can see it and fiddle around when it won’t bother anyone else. My left fingers are generally sore on a daily basis but that’s probably a good thing. For anyone wondering, I’m basically going through lessons on Andy Guitar’s YouTube Channel
The Hydroponic Grow Light
This Christmas present is surprisingly working quite well. I’ve got micro tomatoes, peppers, and strawberries coming up. I’m assuming it’ll speed up once the environment gets a bit warmer. We only keep the house around 22 degrees C.
STILL waiting for the New Kia Sportage
As far as I know, we’re still looking at early March for it to arrive. I’m SOOO looking forward to it!
New Tattoo
I posted my Badger, Brambles, and Blackberries tattoo in many other places but I’m so happy with it! Could be my last one though? I’m getting on a bit and running out of space.
Finally! I have the last laugh.
This cane was a gag gift given to me by my staff on my 30th birthday at Spinvox. Now, approaching 52, my hips are starting to fail and this thing is proving useful. X-Rays have been taken last week and I should get the results back this week. Could be a hip replacement unless it’s caused by something exotic - rather than just arthritis.
Screenshots from “The Lab”
As I mentioned in previous posts, I’ve built a Home Lab Kubernetes cluster using 4 Raspberry Pi 5’s. So, what have I been doing with it?
- Setup ArgoCD to control everything that’s installed in the cluster with code. You can view the code too if you like. All open source.
- Installed the Kube-Prometheus-Stack to monitor everything and give me a Grafana dashboard.
- Installed cert-manager to allow me to encrypt all these websites in transit with TLS.
- Installed external-dns, which lets me create DNS entries in AWS Route 53 - which resolve to INTERNAL IP addresses. Whist this could theoretically let attackers know how my home network is setup, it’s largely an irrelevance - and saves me from having to run a DNS server at home.
- Installed sealed-secrets, which allows me to put strongly encrypted secrets into my public code repository. I.e. I can make the repo that controls all this public, and you can’t see any real secret values.
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Setup backups with Velero
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Deployed Uptime-Kuma to monitor both my Lab, and my public infrastructure.
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And finally, I’ve setup Keycloak, which gives me an single-sign-on identity provider. So far I’ve plumbed in Grafana to that but I’ll also hook ArgoCD into it as well.
Social Media Evolution
So, I don’t remember if I posted about it previously but I’ve long closed my Twitter account. It’s a vile right-wing shit hole and frankly I don’t understand how anyone with a shred of ethics can maintain an account there. I’ve also very recently removed The Druid Network’s account too. For short posts I’m happily on BlueSky, or for more technical or longer posts, I’m on Mastodon too. I’m also experimenting with Pixelfed as Instagram’s a bit gross as well.
I’d love to get of Facebook too as it’s enshitifying badly, but I’d lose touch with probably a hundred old friends and family who wouldn’t find me anywhere else.
Anyways…
As always, you can add my RSS feed to your reader of choice. And, if you made it this far, thanks for reading!
Chris