Rained every day this week! Novel! Shame it couldn’t do that in the summer and the allotment would have produced more.

DIY

I got the new kitchen door cut to length this morning, put it in place, lifted it up with the tiny air bags, and got the hinge positions marked. Tomorrow I’ll break out my Dewalt router and get the hinge recesses cut, get the hinges on, and get it put up. I’ll get the handle on later in the week.

Work

I made great progress this week and finished 3 Jira tasks:

• Finished implementing a VPC resize for our “version 2” architecture. This involved destroying and recreating a lot of infrastructure. Like most other places that wisely don’t use a monolithic Terraform setup, this involved a lot of manual terraform destroys via code. But it went pretty smoothly in the end. This resize will never happen on existing customers so the hard part is done.

• In our “version 2” EKS cluster, we were hoping to be able to run it fully on Graviton instances and use ARM64 containers. However, we found that some of our dependencies - looking at you Dynatrace - don’t support ARM64 for ALL their tooling even though it’s 2025… So we chose to decide to switch our small, static node group (for critical pods) back to x86_64. I tested the code against various v1 environments before applying it to v2, and it went smoothly.

• Once the X86_64 node group was in place, I was able to complete the install of the Dynatrace Synthetic Checks tooling. Found it was missing a particular secret, but a quick bit of Terraform code to get that into AWS Secrets Manager, a further External Secret to get it into Kubernetes, and then it was all done.

Personal Projects

Trying - to build my own OCI compliant Registry

In every bank I have ever worked at, they ran their own private Docker image registry. And in every bank, it was Harbor - which is an awesome thing to look at. Yet, I always found it curious why no one wanted to use it anywhere else I went.

Now I know why. Powerful? Yes. But, it’s also so overly opinionated and complex that’s it’s a nightmare to run. You have to install it in a very specific way, there’s no flexibility. It requires you to run annoying scripts to generate config. It really wants you to use the ports it wants to use - anything else you have installed already be damned. I couldn’t let it do that so I tried to install it behind my Nginx reverse proxy and eventually got it working. But then I found it would silently fail when trying to use it from a Github Action - and yet work from my local environment. I could never figure out why. of work.

So, Nope! Uninstalled!. I fell back to what everyone ends up doing - using Github Container Registry and AWS ECR.

The Liminal Radio Project

My open sourced Liminal Radio project is coming along nicely. I have:

• 12 stations that it can tune into now. The 4 new ones are:
  • Kiosk Radio - Brussels, Belgium
  • Radio Caroline - United Kingdom
  • KBOO FM - Portland, Oregon, USA
  • CTUK - Montreal, Canada

All that have meta-data can show it in the player, including long format descriptions, and even the occasional album art. I also rejigged all the SEO stuff on the page so it looks a lot better when shared on social media.

Dev.to

I created an account on Dev.to and the plan is to write a tech article there at least once every 2 weeks for grins. More if I find interesting things to write about.

And finally - TDN

As the webmaster of The Druid Network, I’ve been stuck for some time with our out-of-date members-only social engine running and ancient copy of ELGG. Because it’s so old it requires an old version of PHP and frankly, it’s getting unsafe.

Therefore my plan over this autumn, and probably winter, is to:

1. Duplicate the site into a docker powered test bed.
2. Upgrade its ELGG slowly, version by version, until it’s on the latest.
3. Try my best to not lose any data, but not to worry about our customisations.
4. Upgrade its PHP as needed on any major version.
5. Once it’s all working at the latest version, try to reapply our customisations.
6. Somehow figure out how to re-migrate the data from the old site to the new one - which will have moved on a lot since I started this process.
7. Switch the site over and profit.

That’s My Week

As always, you can add my RSS feed to your reader of choice and if you made it this far thanks for reading!

I cancelled my gym membership yesterday and I feel terribly guilty about it! If you were standing right here in front of me, I’d tell you how oversubscribed the gym was, how it was filled with groups of teenagers hogging machines for ages, how the place was unusable at any convenient time unless you went past 10pm.

But that’s not why my daughter and I stopped going and have now cancelled our membership. It’s because it just became too hard and we lost motivation.

And that’s the last thing I need. Not to gain muscle as I could care less. And certainly not to lose weight. Over the last 8ish years I’ve lost 33.7kg / 74.3 lbs / 5.3 stone. I’ve gone from size 38 trousers down to 34 and from XXL shirts down to just Large. If BMI’s are really any indication of health, I’ve gone from “obese”, down through simply “overweight” range, and I’m within touching distance (8k) of what it thinks is a healthy weight. That’s mostly down to just improving my eating habits.

The main reason I need the gym, is what I’ve touched on before. At 51, I feel my health slipping away a lot. I have no energy. Things hurt that shouldn’t. And I’m getting the occasional brief moments of dizziness from silly actions like walking up stairs or carrying heavy stuff, and I feel some just basic exercise might hold that off.

No idea what I’m gonna do now though. Exercise at home could be an option but that comes with it’s own motivational issues. There IS a new gym opening that’s a bit more expensive, and is “contract”, so it might be a bit less packed. I’ll gonna think about it over the next few days, see what my daughter plans to do, and make a decision.

Interesting Posts Read

• Digital Decluttering - Topical! Because of link-rot and websites that vanish, I’ve been keeping an archive of internet things I want to keep for nearly 20 years now - which I’ll surely be sued for someday no doubt - but I’ve got decades (gigabytes) of photos and old MP3 files that I really need to clean up. I should make a plan.

Druid / Charity Stuff

At The Druid Network this week I leaned in hard to make some progress in building a new members-only forum with Discourse. I’ve had it installed in a containerised environment in AWS for ages, but over the last week I’ve:

• Updated it.
• Stripped it all out, wiped all the data, and reinstalled it with each piece (Postgresql, Redis, etc) protected by passwords.
• Enabled SSL/TLS Encryption.
• Got the email working via AWS SES - which is what the rest of our charity systems currently use. This reminds me that I’ve never really discussed the thorny topic of email with my fellow trustees. There’s no large email service provider that isn’t without ethical issues. Google. Microsoft. Amazon. All a bit evil in one way or another.
• Searched for and tested a few themes, and enabled a dark/light button.
• Had a play with creating a public category within the overall private forum. This didn’t go so well.

With some luck and motivation, I’ll invite some of the other charity trustees to play with it in the next few weeks. This whole thing is just a proof of concept so it might not end up being used. Makes a great technical challenge though.

Speaking of Email

I’m getting closer to going back to running my own mail server with Docker Mailserver.

It’s … complicated in this day and age:

• A SpamAssassin Surprise
• How to set up a private email server
• Set Up SMTP Server – A Step-By-Step Tutorial
• Is It Worth Making Your Own Email Servers and Hosting

Speaking of Docker

It seemed to be a day for cancelling things as I also downgraded my Docker subscription. A few days ago they announced an 80% price jump without any compelling added value. That’ll put me back on their free plan once my current subscription expires in May 2025.

Thing is, I wanted to support them and I was happy to do so when they moved from a totally free service to a paid model several years back. But, whether from greed or desperation, they’re losing the plot!

There is no service they offer that you can’t get for free elsewhere so, I’ll just use their free service for now, and start making the slow move to newer workflows, and new places to store my Docker images in future.

Note: This has no effect on my TDN work or how I run my own tech stacks. Docker on a server is a different beast than Docker as I use on my laptop. My subscription only really affects how I locally develop things on the Macbook.