My homelab rack has been running as is for a while now — it’s time for a few new projects.

I’m rearranging stuff to better utilize the space, looking into 25 Gbit networking, and putting a HP Z440 server to good use 🙂

We have a Dakboard digital calendar in our kitchen — showing lots of house and temperature data. So naturally; it must show the actual outdoor temperature as well.

To do this I used a Raspberry Pi 2, and a DS18B20 HAT I made some years back.

Our Komfovent balanced ventilation system is pretty bad at accurate timekeeping — the time drifts several minutes over the course of a few months. This is a bit annoying as the operator panel is prominently located on the second floor, and we use it to tell time.

Luckily; the time can be set using the Modbus interface.

I recently upgraded all my Proxmox VE servers from version 7 to 8 — which was a straight forward and easy process. But one server presented a challenge; the hypervisor running my router. How to apt dist-upgrade with the router down?

It turned out to be very easy, here is how 👇

I’ve been using my HP ZBook 15 G5 laptop a lot lately, but it annoyed me that I couldn’t tap the touchpad in i3. It does have physical buttons — but I’m used to tapping on the pad… My laptop is running Arch Linux BTW 😉

Luckily it was really easy to fix 🙂

In May last year; I did some changes to the dark mode theme and syntax highlighting on this blog. Resulting in higher contrast, improved syntax highlighting in light mode, and a few others things.

It took me a while to get around to document this, but here we go 👇

Over the Christmas holidays, organizing some tools, I realized my screwdriver collection was in pretty poor shape. I can’t even remember the last time I purchased a new screwdriver…

I actually think most of them were in a tool-box that my wife had — when we first met. I’ve bought plenty of tools over the years, but new screwdrivers, apparently.

So; I ordered some Wera screwdriver sets, and a few other things 👇

I recently got a new laptop, (well — not new, but new to me), a HP ZBook 15 G5. After installing Arch Linux and the i3 wm I spend some time setting up power management, suspend on idle, and figuring out the state of the battery.

I’ve been thinking about getting some CCTV cameras for a while, and last summer I purchased two Reolink PoE cameras. The footage is stored on a SD card, and uploaded to a local FTP server.

But I also wanted to record continuously, without getting a dedicated Reolink NVR. I’ve seen some YouTube videos by Tall Paul Tech where he uses FFmpeg to record CCTV footage — so let’s do that! 🙂

I’ve had a recurring thought, following by some intense Googling — using this Hugo powered site to microblog. The idea has been fueled by two desires; owning my own “microblogging” data — and making it quicker, and easier, to post something on my own domain.

Being able to quickly snap a photo with my phone and publish it is not so easy with a static website. So I got the idea of using the Todoist app, and their API to post, build, and publish.

This is the story of how I did it, and why it wasn’t a good idea.